Chapter Six
Savage
I don’t know how long we sit together. Long enough that the adrenaline drains out of the room. Quiet settles over us both, the only real noise being the harsh, rattling sound of my breathing.
Eventually, I feel more like myself. Or at least the numb, detached version of myself that I slip into after I have one of these little panic whatevers. The part of me that was concerned about infecting Micah with my toxins is walled off in a distant section of my mind, letting out occasional muffled screams, while the rest of me is too selfish and desperate for comfort to care about the consequences.
My head is resting on his shoulder, so it doesn’t take much strength to turn to my left until I’m facing him. I’m too close to see his whole face, but it doesn’t matter. He fills my field of vision, and the smell of whatever fruity soap he uses is wallpapering over the scent of vomit in my nostrils, so I’ll take it.
“Why are you being nice to me, Bambi?” I ask. My voice is rougher than it was before my little couch-diving vomit adventure, so I sound even more like a cartoon villain. It’s fitting.
Micah leans back a little to get a better look at me. I can feel the warmth rolling off his skin, and we’re both sweaty from exertion. I think that if he pulled away from me right now, I might dissolve.
“Because you’re still my brother, asshole.”
I snort. He never did mince words, even if he used to be a lot more shy about it.
“You should kick me out,” I mumble into the pale, sweaty skin of his shoulder.
“Yeah, well, you’re not the boss of me. And neither is Patrick. You should be in a hospital, but he’s made it clear that’s not going to happen. Without legal medical care, I’m the next best thing. I don’t trust him not to put you in a dog kennel and let you bleed to death. So, you’re stuck here until you’re healthy enough to fight me over it. Thankfully, your father seemed to be happy to have one less thing to worry about, so he didn’t put up much of a fight when I offered to have you recover here.”
A swirl of conflicting emotions hits me right in the breastbone, but I don’t have the energy to deal with any of them right now, so I let the numbness shove them aside.
“He left?”
“Yeah, hun,” he says, his voice going soft. His hand comes up and rests on the back of my head, right where he grabbed me by the hair earlier. It rests there, hovering like he wants to stroke my hair or something and is stopping himself.
I feel like a pathetic little kid, but I would give my left nut for him to stroke my hair right now, I swear. Where the fuck have my nuts gotten me, anyway? My skin is prickling with the screaming need to be touched in any kind of comfort, and I’m so desperate for it, but so unwilling to ask, the conflict makes my insides turn to sludge.
Micah’s hand stays put, barely touching me, just resting on the back of my head like a tease of the kind of familial comfort I’m not allowed to have.
I try not to feel the disappointment that’s tugging at the edge of my awareness when I think about the fact that Father isn’t here anymore. Of course he left. Why would he hang around to watch me sleep off an injury?
I’m still a little shocked he went to so much effort to save me in the first place. It probably has more to do with asserting his dominance over the Aryans than actually protecting me, so it makes sense that he’d farm me out to Micah’s care as soon as he could and then head back to take care of the Banna. They’re his real family, after all.
That’s what he’s always told me. Well, he always told me that they’re my real family and deserve my allegiance over anything else in life, even over the woman I end up marrying and the children I end up having, but the underlying message was always clear.
The joke’s on him though, because he has no idea that I’m way too fucking broken to ever have children. It’s his fault, of course, but I wouldn’t want to give him the sick satisfaction of knowing that.
“And you don’t mind having a fucking criminal bleeding and puking all over your floor?” I try not to sound vulnerable when I say it. I’m digging around in my chest for my normal tough-guy gangster voice, but it seems to have wilted away in the power of Micah’s unflappable presence.
Because the truth is, now that Micah is next to me again, my entire existence is screaming that this is the way it was always meant to be. That he was the missing chunk from my life—the approximation of a family I’ve always secretly craved—and if I let him go one more time, I won’t survive.
He laughs softly. “I mean, I could do with less vomiting in the future, but it’s always better out than in. And you’re not a random gangster, you’re you . You always have a place here.” There’s a pause, and I can tell he’s working out how to say something. “As long as you don’t mind living in the same apartment as a homo.”
It feels like all the air is sucked out of the room, although I’m not sure why. Micah is looking me straight in the eye, leaning back with an unwavering, confident expression. There’s a grim set to his face, like he’s aware that I might freak out or say horrible, terrible things to him, but there’s no hesitation.
Once again, I’m overwhelmed by how fucking strong of a man he’s grown into.
“I will not tolerate homophobia in this house. I know you live and work with Neanderthals, and they were all fucking rude while they were here, but I expect you to do better if you ever loved me. You don’t have to like it, but you have to respect me enough to keep your mouth shut and be polite, or I’ll find someplace else for you to stay. I still love you, brother, but I’m not undoing a lifetime’s worth of work on getting comfortable with myself to let someone stay here who’s going to chip away at that.”
I couldn’t describe how I’m feeling if you microwaved it directly from my consciousness. All I know is that whatever it is, it’s strong. Overwhelming. I’m looking into Micah’s river-blue eyes, and I can’t believe how much he’s changed.
The nervous, terrified kid has turned into this formidable person who’s telling me—someone who could normally bench press him—to take him as is or get out.
I can’t even conceive of what it would be like to do that.
All of my inarticulate, unnamable emotion swells and swells inside me until I’m choking on it, and it starts leaking out of my eyes. I don’t know why, because I’m not crying. I’m not making any noise. There are just tears slipping out of my eyes and wetting my cheeks in still silence.
It’s weird and embarrassing, but that’s been such a theme of the day that I think I’ve become numb to the feeling of it.
Micah cocks his head at me when he notices, his eyebrows quirking and his eyes boring into mine.
“Tadhg?”
I shake my head, trying to shake off the weird, fractured pieces of emotions that are causing the storm inside my head. The motion dislodges his hand from the back of my head, and I immediately miss it.
Clearing my throat, I try to sound normal when I answer him. I can’t explain to him what’s wrong. I can’t even explain it to myself. I need him to stop looking at me and not ask any more questions than I’m prepared to answer right now, which is zero.
“I’m fine,” I croak out. “It’s fine. I wouldn’t want you to be anything other than yourself.”
For some reason, that last part makes that swirl of emotion rage instead of relax, and I make a choked sound that might have wanted to be a sob.
God, I’m such a disgusting mess of a human being. No wonder Da fucking hates me.
I swallow the noise down and don’t make it again, and then force the most wooden, unbelievable smile onto my face.
“It’s fine,” I say again.
Micah keeps frowning and doesn’t let his eyes drift away from my face. He tightens his grip on me a little bit and I can see him working out what to say, but eventually he seems to settle on not making me talk about it anymore, thank fuck.
“Okay, Tadhg,” he says, reaching out to wipe away the wetness on my cheeks without acknowledging it out loud. Which only makes more tears slip out, obviously.
Jesus fucking Christ, Savage. Get it together.
I take in a deep breath through my nose, shake my head a little bit to try to shake loose all this bullshit, and then pull myself out of his grasp. I don’t have the strength to fully move away from him, but his closeness is making the world feel too soft and delicate, it’s making me soft and delicate. It’s confusing me.
Once I get his soft, strong hands off me, I’ll feel more like myself.
“Can you help me back onto the couch, please?”
Hopefully, this will change the subject forever and we can never talk about it again.
Micah
I’m so confused.
I was expecting disgust. Possibly anger, or disappointment, or whatever echo of Patrick’s normal toxic behavior Tadhg is used to repeating when it comes to encountering homosexuals in the wild.
I was hoping he would be able to temper it because of his childhood affection for me, and I could gradually chip away at all that toxic masculinity until I eventually revealed the sweet, gentle brother I used to know.
I was not expecting tears.
Why the fuck did he cry? Was he so angry and disgusted, but too weak to do anything else about it in his wounded state? Or maybe he realized that I’m too different to ever fit into his life, and once he’s better, he’s going to leave and we’ll never see each other again, and he was sad about it?
It’s all weird and nonsensical.
And stupid. Obviously. There’s no reason for my gayness to upset him at all, but I was never na?ve enough to expect a neutral reaction. I was just hoping for a non-violent one.
I’ll let it go for now, because he’s had enough of a day already and he just woke up. But we’ll be circling back to this eventually, I guarantee it. Patrick has had twelve years to plant toxic shit in my brother and I’m going to pull it all out, root and stem.
For now, I need to fix whatever he just fucked up about his physical health, though.
I help him get back onto the couch and more or less comfortable. I clean up the mess, and then give him a quick wipe down and look over his wounds. He seems sleepy and goes quiet as I work. His eyes are open, but he’s barely responsive. Almost like he’s dissociating.
It actually freaks me out, so I talk while I work. I talk to him about my job and try to reassure him that while the whole situation is awkward, me caring for him feels completely normal, so there’s no reason for him to be self-conscious about it. I’m not sure how much it sinks in, but hopefully he takes the point. I let him know that I’ll call in some favors and get my shifts covered for the next few days. I’ll tell my department head I had a family emergency.
She’s not going to like it, but it is what it is. I can’t exactly leave him here alone when he’s like this. Who knows what he’ll do next.
Tadhg gradually becomes more and more tired until his eyelids are drooping, and I know he’s not hearing a word I say. Luckily, he’s so sleepy that when I remind him he probably needs to pee, because I’ve been pumping fluids into him after all the blood that he lost, he’s too tired to make it super awkward. It only takes a second for me to convince him that there’s no way in hell he’s walking to the bathroom. Instead, I bring over a water jug with a wide opening for him to use as a urinal that I can throw away whenever this is over, then move to the kitchen to give him some privacy while he relieves himself.
It takes him a painfully long time to fumble with his blankets and boxers when he’s this weak. If he were a patient, I would never let him piss unassisted at this point. Nobody has time for this, let’s be honest.
But after the crisis we just got through, plus his awkward reaction to me coming out to him, I don’t want to push any more than I have to. Activities that involve his naked cock—no matter that helping a sick person urinate is quite literally one of the least arousing activities you can participate in—would be opening up another can of worms, I’m sure.
Instead, I take over a wipe to quickly clean up any mess once he’s done and then flush the contents down the toilet. At least there’s no blood in his urine, thank fuck. If his kidneys were injured, we’d be way, way beyond the boundaries of my emergency couch medicine.
And Tadhg continues to slip closer and closer to sleep through all of this.
By the time I have him clean and another round of fluids and antibiotics running through his new IV, he’s out cold. I’m guessing he’ll sleep for a long time, given the amount of stress he put his body under in the last hour.
I take the time to clean up the apartment. The goons didn’t leave too much of a mess, thank god, even if they ate a ton of my food. There’s a small pile on the table of Tadhg’s crap that they left for him, including a gun that I firmly refuse to touch.
Not that I can’t. I’m an Oklahoma/Missouri boy, after all. But I don’t believe that guns are good for the world, and just because I know how to use one doesn’t mean I think that doing it is beneficial.
Hard pass.
I spend a long time on the phone arranging my time off work, which really means arguing with people. By the end of it, I’ve given up on subtlety. I’m straight-up telling people my brother has a life-threatening medical condition and needs me to take care of him.
None of them knew I had a brother, and I seriously doubt they’re able to track down the kind of paper trail that would reveal his identity. I know Tadhg is lying low here, but we’re a long way from the people looking for him and a handful of ER nurses in a middle-of-nowhere hospital in a different state aren’t going to be the key to him getting caught.
He sleeps for so long, I’m able to get a full eight hours myself after I detach him from his empty IV bags once the infusion is done. Which feels unnatural because I’m more used to catnaps here and there, followed by the occasional binge-sleep during my days off to catch up.
Which, as a nurse, I’m aware you can’t do. But buying into that eight hours every single night crap is quitter talk. Daywalker talk that doesn’t apply to nightshifters, who are fueled by caffeine and willpower alone.
When I wake up, Tadhg is thankfully in exactly the same position I left him, sleeping peacefully. I’m able to shower, make myself some coffee, and tidy up a little more before he starts to stir.
Of course, once he opens his eyes, all hell has to break loose again. Because why could anything be easy about this week?