Chapter Five
Savage
I t’s too dark. I can tell my eyes are open because they’re dry as hell, but the world isn’t coming into focus. Forcing myself to blink is unnaturally difficult, but I do it repeatedly until the blurry outlines form themselves into shapes.
I’m inside, and wherever it is doesn’t look like a safe house. It looks like somewhere normal people live.
I shift to get a better look, but it only reminds me I’m injured. Pain screams up my left side from my hip to my shoulder, and then it seems to echo through my body like a bell being rung.
A whimper slips out of me, and my first thought is to look for Father, in case he can hear me. It’s bad enough that I nearly got taken out by our mortal enemies. If he sees me whimpering and whining about it like a child, he might be tempted to finish the job himself.
Father hates displays of weakness and submission more than anything. He says it goes against everything we stand for. And right now, I feel weaker and more fragile than I knew was possible.
My entire body aches and weighs me so heavily into whatever rough fabric I’m lying on that I’m threatening to dissolve through to the floor. But it’s heavy in an unstable way. Like those ships at the bottom of the ocean covered in rust and barnacles. They’re still a thousand tons of dead weight but look like one well-placed hit could cause them to shatter.
There’s a rustling noise somewhere, but I can’t turn my head far enough to see. It sounds like someone moving toward me, which makes me tense defensively. Not that I would be able to fight even the most meager threat at this point. Why bother trying?
My stomach cramps painfully while the wound in my hip throbs, and I wonder if it would have been easier if the Aryans had just shot me in the head.
“Tadhg?”
I hear a voice but still can’t make out a face. And I’m not sure who would be speaking, because no one’s called me anything but Savage in years.
Unless… Did Father use my real name before? Or was that some kind of fever dream?
Everything hurts too much to care.
Warm, soft hands touch my face. I flinch back at first, but the grip is too strong and I’m being turned to look into a pair of big, dark blue eyes. As soon as I see Micah’s face again, the other memories filter back, and I realize this isn’t the first time I’ve woken up since they dragged me away from the courthouse.
The fog inside my head clears. We drove for a long time, while I gradually felt sicker and sicker. I must have had a fever, because everything I remember from the drive is distorted and unreal.
I was dreaming about me and Micah when we were kids, and I thought it might be a sign I was dying. Or already dead and had somehow snuck my way into something passing for a decent afterlife.
Then I woke up feeling mostly lucid, and Micah was here. All grown up and moving around me with a level of self-assured confidence I barely recognized.
Father was here too, along with Colm and the others. But now, everything’s quiet.
Micah’s eyes search my face as he touches me, pressing on my skin in different places like he’s looking for something. At some point he must have turned on a lamp, because a soft orange light is casting deep shadows on his face. I don’t know what to say, so I take a look at him while he’s feeling my face, peeling back my eyelids, and pressing his fingers against my throat over my fluttering pulse, like a horse about to be sold at auction.
He’s lost the softness in his face, although his eyes are still just as big and bright. His cheeks used to be round; now he has the kind of cheekbones you see on models or TikTok stars that look like they could cut glass, and his lips have that kind of permanent pout everybody wants as well. He looks beautiful, in a delicate, sophisticated sort of way. The total opposite of everything I’m used to looking at.
He looks grown up.
“You’re really here?”
Those are the first words that actually make their way out of my mouth. They come out a little slurred, but I’m a lot more with it than I was any of the other times I woke up. Micah smiles a little, and I see the hint of a dimple that makes him look more like the boy in my memories.
Which makes me want to put a real smile on his face, but I don’t know if I have that in me right now. I blink a few more times to snap my brain back to reality and then try to shuffle myself up into a seated position, but the pain stops me before I get anywhere.
“Stop that,” Micah hisses, putting his hands on my shoulders to keep me in the same position. “You’re lucky to be alive, you great big buffoon of a man. Do you have any idea how scared I was? Your scumbag father darkens my doorstep after all these years, only to put me in charge of saving you from whatever disaster he got you into. I swear to god, Tadhg, if you crawl back into my life now only to die on me, I will never forgive you. I will fucking hara-kiri myself and follow you to the afterlife so I can scold you forever. Do you understand?”
He’s staring at me, and his big Bambi eyes are so wide and serious I can’t look away. It’s like a wall in my mind comes crashing down, and I remember exactly what it feels like to have someone in the world give a shit whether you live or die. Not because of what they need you for, but because they care about you.
I haven’t had that since the day he left, and I think I forced myself to forget.
Now he’s holding my face in his tender hands and looking at me like he wants me to live. The small, slithering thing inside my chest that had been steadily whispering to me how much better it might have been if I’d died is retreating in the face of all that warmth.
“Tadhg?”
His voice is soft and earnest, and the sound is so real and close to me it makes my chest crumple like a soda can being stepped on.
My throat tightens, heat rushes to my face, and suddenly, every breath I take feels like it’s a whole-body process, until I’m rocking forward, like I’m rolling on the ocean. My brain fills with static, and my thoughts are an indistinct jumble I can’t pick through. The only things I’m able to focus on are the way my breaths are speeding up, rolling through my body one crashing wave at a time, and Micah’s face.
I’m not really aware that I’m crying. Crying isn’t something I’m supposed to do. Ever.
Of course, like everything else that Father expects me to be ‘better than’ , it’s something I do all the fucking time.
The familiar prickle around my eyes and wetness on my face tell me it’s too late to stop it. Instead, I focus on trying to catch my breath, but I can’t. I’m still rocking forward with it, so much it hurts my side every time I move.
Micah’s eyes go wide for a moment, but his expression switches to something placid yet confident in an instant. I’d be impressed if I had the mental capacity for it. He takes in a breath and sighs, the words, “Oh, honey,” escaping his lips like a prayer.
Of course, that doesn’t help. The absurdity of it—someone calling me, Padraig Moynihan’s pet butcher—‘ honey’ , makes me want to laugh. But the laugh gets caught up in the rest of the squeezing and straining that’s going on inside me, and it comes out just as choked as every other breath.
Micah’s hands are still on my face. His eyes flick from side to side quickly, like he’s trying to decide something. He’s been able to fix everything else that was fucked up about me so far. Hell, maybe he can fix this too.
With only a little hesitation, Micah folds his legs up under him and lies next to me on the couch. It’s a decent size and made of some dark blue fabric that matches his eyes, but I take up a lot of space. He’s slender though, like he used to be, even if his personality gives off the impression of someone who takes up more space now. He manages to shimmy into an impossibly small sliver of space in between my body and the edge of the sofa, and before I know it, his cheek is resting on my shoulder.
If it were anyone else, it would be impossibly, unfathomably weird. But with Micah, all this does is activate a bunch of muscle-memory pathways in my brain I’d forgotten about.
He used to get so scared. He was a tiny slip of a thing, and Father’s rage seemed like a monster that filled the whole house sometimes. Even if we were hidden, Micah would tremble and cry, so I would pull him close until he calmed down. I couldn’t do a lot about the shitty situation we were both in, but if clinging to me made him less scared, I was happy to let him bury his face in my neck and clutch at my side until he stopped shaking.
So now, although I’m the one freaking out, my body does exactly what it used to without needing any input from me. He’s on my uninjured side, so I’m able to lift my arm enough for him to slip underneath it. His cheek presses into my shoulder, and then the warmth of his palm finds my face again. His weight is draped against my body from top to bottom, and it’s like a line of warmth and stillness I can anchor myself by.
My chest is still trying to turn itself inside out and my body is being taken along for the ride, but I focus on how calm Micah is. There’s a solidity to him he didn’t have before. He feels like something indestructible, while I feel like a 210 lb weight that’s about to be blown away.
Like dandelion seeds in a frigid breeze.
I want to turn and wrap myself around him until I’m as solid as he is. But my left arm is fucking useless. Instead, all I can do is dig the fingers of my right hand into whatever part of him I can reach and cling to it. With his shirt fisted in my hand and my eyes closed, I stave off the impending embarrassment for the sake of getting my shit under control. My ragged, raspy breathing fills the room with sound.
At least now I know Father definitely isn’t here anymore, or he would have knocked us both off this couch by now.
Achingly slowly, like a seedling opening its first leaves, the muscles in my chest unclench one by one. My breathing gradually evens out, although the shaking seems to have set up shop in my body and is refusing to leave.
The more relaxed the rest of me gets, the weirder the shaking feels. It’s not like normal, hyperventilating trembling. It’s more like electrical shocks. Like my body is jerking suddenly in small, unpredictable ways, and I can’t control it.
Fuck it. I don’t care anymore. It’s not the first time my body has betrayed me; I’m sure it won’t be the last.
I can’t even die right.
I think I want to tear off my skin and crawl into the nearest corpse to see if that works out any better for me.
Micah uses his hand resting on my face to turn me to face him. He’s barely two inches away. It’s the weirdest here-but-not-here feeling, like I’m living in a memory and the present at the same time. Everything we’re doing feels inherently normal and comforting because it’s something we’ve done a million times before. But also, twelve years and a lifetime of changes are standing between those versions of us and who we are now.
I’m abruptly aware of how much older Micah looks, although I noticed it before. It’s like the thought lurches into my brain. His face is smooth, but I can see a hint of stubble, like he hasn’t had the chance to shave in a while. He smells good, like much fancier soap than any man I know would ever own. And his hair, which always used to be a mess, is styled now. Like the kind of messy curls you pay a lot of money for, because you want to tempt people to run their fingers through them.
Because my former little brother is an adult now. He’s an adult with his own life, who probably has a job and goes on dates and has normal fucking sex and pays taxes and does all the other things that people who aren’t scumbags do with their time.
Suddenly, it seems like I’m tainting him just by letting him touch me.
I’m the one who was too weak to escape Father’s influence. I let him drag me down into the mud and turn me into exactly the kind of evil, disgusting piece of shit I always knew he would. And then, without my permission, he saved my life by dragging me all the way to Micah, so I could infect the only good person I know with this disgusting bullshit.
As much as I was jealous of him for getting out, he deserved it. I can’t jeopardize that for him. I need to get away from him before I put him in danger. Or worse, he realizes exactly what I let Da turn me into.
“Get off,” I say, my voice coming out in a rasp. Everywhere he’s touching me feels like a brand. Like the poison is seeping out of my skin and burning into his. I need it to stop.
Micah looks at me with a confused frown on his face.
“What?”
“Get off!” I’m choking on the words. My body is flushing hot and cold, and I feel like my limbs are going to jerk so hard they might tear themselves apart. I need to escape. The panic makes my stomach churn; while my heart races and my vision starts to swim.
I realize this is more than just the despair that hit me a minute ago. There’s something wrong with me. I’m not registering the pain of my wounds anymore; all I can feel is wrong . Like my body is screaming a warning at me.
Maybe it’s telling me I’m dying. Or maybe my body agrees that I’m toxic, and I need to get away from Micah before he gets hurt. Whatever the feeling is, it’s tearing through me like wildfire.
“Oh fuck,” I think Micah mutters as he scrabbles to put his feet on the floor.
I’m relieved he’s finally getting the fuck away from me. But then he turns and puts his hands on me, catching my shoulders when I do my best to pitch my broken, twitching body off the couch.
“Tadhg, stop! Stay still, you’ll hurt yourself.”
I need him to stop touching me. I think my skin is about to melt off my bones. The floor lurches underneath me, and I shove Micah away as well as I can before I nosedive into the floor.
The fall is barely a foot, but I land directly on my eye socket, so pain throbs through my face while the rest of my body crumples downward in slow motion. There’s a tearing feeling in my hand, and then I’m pretty sure I see blood and maybe water spilling over me and onto the carpet.
Micah keeps touching me, pulling at me with his fucking soft, warm hands, trying to move me to do I don’t know what.
My stomach clenches again, this time hard enough to make me double over. I’m on my side on the floor, I think, and I curl myself up as tightly as I can with the left side of my body too injured to cooperate.
Blood is everywhere now. My face is wet with it, and the world smells like iron. And Micah won’t leave.
My stomach heaves, and then I’m choking as something bitter fills my mouth. I can’t breathe, and whenever I try, there’s too much snot and vomit to get any air. I try to roll onto my back, but I’m too dizzy to tell which way is up, and my body is still jerking with those electric shocks that make it hard to move.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
Micah’s voice is disembodied, floating around me. The world seems intangible, and all I can do is reach out and grab for something to hold on to.
My hands come up empty, because there’s nothing to grab. I’m anchorless. But then a strong arm wraps around my waist and a hand grips me by the hair. Someone comes up behind me, as my body gets twisted against my will. The hand pulls on my hair until my neck stretches out long, and when my stomach heaves again to puke, this time thin, bright yellow liquid spills out of my mouth.
Air rushes in to replace it, and it’s such a relief I feel myself sag. I blink a few times and take one deep, heaving breath after another, trying to reorient myself and chase away the blackness that was edging into my vision. My throat is screaming raw from where I think I inhaled some vomit, and the thought is so disgusting I almost puke again, but my stomach is empty when it lurches this time.
My hoarse breathing fills my ears, and my body is shaking so hard I know I can’t be holding myself up. Especially when I only have my right hand on the ground.
Awareness is coming back to me, bit by bit. I’m kneeling on the carpet. I can see a disgusting mess of blood and vomit underneath me, and my good arm is propping me up, seeping blood from the spot where I must have ripped out an IV, while my injured arm hangs limply.
Micah’s holding me up, I realize. It’s his arm around my chest and his hand in my hair. It’s a weird sensation, but I also don’t want him to let go. The moment I inhaled and choked on my own vomit was the most profound sense of terror I think I’ve ever felt, and this is not my first time almost dying. It was a visceral, whole-body sense of impending doom. And his hand in my hair—keeping me upright and not letting me collapse back into a scrunched-up ball of disaster-flesh—is the only thing keeping it from happening again.
I relax into his arms and breathe until the world makes more sense. A little at a time.
After a while, Micah must be tired, because he pulls us both down into a sitting position. He props himself up against the boxy couch and then leans my back against his chest. I’m nearly twice the width of him, but it doesn’t matter. It still feels anchoring.
His hand moves to the center of my chest, his fingers splayed as I take one rattling breath after another. I can feel him breathing behind me, and gradually I fall into the same rhythm as him. Deep, slow breaths. Mine sounds wet and putrid.
His other hand, I realize, has slipped out of my hair at some point because I’m laying my head back against his shoulder. He holds my wrist for a while, maybe checking my pulse again, and then presses his fingers against the bleeding tear in the skin where the IV used to be.
We lie together in a communal trauma heap for a long time before either of us speaks.
“Just let me help you.”
That’s the thing Micah eventually says. He whispers it, because his face is still next to mine. And he tightens his grip on my chest as he says the words. I can’t imagine what he thinks is the reason I freaked out and tried to yeet myself into fucking oblivion from his couch, but I’m sure it wasn’t a pretty sight.
Either way, here he is. Still keeping me upright. Refusing to let me go.
I sigh and lean more of my weight into his body. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here, but I’m too tired now to work it out.
Micah
I knew I would have my hands full with Tadhg’s injuries. And I was fully expecting Patrick and his goons to be a constant pain in my ass.
Reuniting with Tadhg once he woke up… That was something I was hoping would not be a big deal. Worst-case scenario, it was going to be a little awkward. Once the moron mafia packed up and left to plot their world takeover or whatever, I’d had a little peace and quiet to consider it.
I called out to work and then sat in the dark, monitoring my brother’s vitals as they slowly strengthened, waiting for him to come back to me. And in the meantime, I tried to picture everything that might have happened to him in the past twelve years.
In everything that crossed my mind, I never expected him to react like he did. But now I feel stupid as hell.
Of course he’s changed. Of course, he’s been warped and twisted and controlled until he’s a shadow of his shitty, abusive father, and nothing like the boy who used to protect me. His father is the only constant he’s ever had in life, considering his mother overdosed on heroin when he was too young to remember, and I abandoned him before either of us had the chance to truly grow up.
Homophobia and toxic masculinity run deeper in Patrick than anything else. Based on the way his associates watched me, I’m assuming that’s the standard he enforces across his crew.
I should never have laid down next to Tadhg like that. Something that was innocent and comforting when we were little kids carries different connotations now that we’re adults. Even if I still think of him as a brother, we’re not actually related. We were never even legally considered stepbrothers, because Mom and Pat didn’t bother with a marriage license.
And now we’re practically strangers. Strangers who laid next to each other on a single sofa.
It must have been enough to trigger his “no gay shit” reflex and make him nearly kill himself trying to scrabble away from me. Watching the color drain from his skin while he aspirated on his fucking vomit… That was an experience.
Knowing it was all because he was so desperate not to touch me? Yeah, that wasn’t a high point of my existence.
Now, he’s exhausted, lying still in my arms, and I can’t tell if his initial reaction was a knee-jerk panic response and this is the real him, or if that was the real him and this is him being too exhausted to fight anymore.
I can put up with a lot. The way I move, the way I talk, everything about me screamed queer since before I was old enough to understand what it meant. Which isn’t ideal for a child in the Bible Belt, even if things are better than they used to be. But I learned to embrace it, and to stand up for myself, and it ultimately made me stronger. If I had the choice to go back, I wouldn’t change anything about myself.
I’d change the fucking world to make it less shitty, so other kids aren’t forced to be that strong, but I wouldn’t change a thing about me.
Tadhg continues to breathe, propped up against my chest. The rattle I hear tells me he definitely aspirated, but there’s nothing I can do about it now. He’s already getting all the antibiotics I have. If that’s not enough, Tristan will have to come back with something else.
I just need him to calm down. He looked fucking terrified. First, terrified of me, then he had that look in his eye patients sometimes have right before they die.
A ‘sense of impending doom’ is a real medical symptom, and I’ve seen it in too many people’s faces not to believe them when they say it. That was how Tadhg looked. Like his body was falling out from under him, and he was preparing to be detached from it.
But we’re both still here.
In the dim light, I look down at the tattoos crawling all over his body. They’re all violent. Knives. Guns. Skulls. A lot of symbols I vaguely recognize as gang signs, and some that I’m pretty sure are meant to represent things like the kills you’ve made.
I don’t know what I’m going to do about this situation. If Patrick has genuinely turned my brother into a monster, Tadhg might not be willing to let me take care of him once he’s strong enough to put some distance between us. But now that he’s here, I realize I still love him as much as I used to.
I’m going to try. Even if I have to tolerate some homophobic bullshit. His recovery is going to be slow, and they don’t have anyone else to take care of him. If Patrick has spent the last decade being a devil on his shoulder, this is my chance to be an angel.
A very gay, exhausted angel.