fic: Humpty Dumpty
Title: Humpty Dumpty
Fandom: Jericho
Rating: PG
Characters: Jake, Johnston, mentions of Eric and others
Word Count: 425
Disclaimer: Soon, soon, my lovely Jericho will be back. But still, none of it is, was, or ever will be mine.
Summary: Jake's head during those angsty little moments between him and Johnston in "Federal Response."
Johnston says he doesn’t care, and Jake’s heart breaks. Even after all this time, it’s just that easy. Easier maybe, because then he had a shell ten feet thick surrounded by walls ten feet high. Now he has nothing. Now he has years spent at war, years spent at penance, and too many lives on his hands, on his conscience. The walls broke down, the shell cracked, and he crawled home a different man, a naked man.
He thought his father was starting to see that. He knew his mother did, with the way she pushed at him, the way she stared at him when she thought he didn’t notice, and sometimes when she knew he would. His mother saw every broken piece, and she was trying to patch him up with a glue gun and a hammer she fondly called family.
Sometimes he thinks it’s working. Sometimes the looks Eric gives him aren’t chock-full of loathing, sometimes Stanley doesn’t seem to wonder when he’s going to ditch him again, and sometimes Emily deigns to talk to him. Sometimes.
But this is the largest hurdle. Boys who grow up in shadows as large as the one cast by Johnston Green fall into one of two places. He could be Eric, a daddy’s boy and brown-noser to the core. Good student, husband, citizen. All shiny on the outside to break through some of that shadow, but dark on the inside: afraid of success and leadership, and hiding a broken marriage. Or he could be Jake, model screw-up and stereotypical prodigal son, tarnished inside and out. When he left his father fought off the fires in his wake, and now that he’s back…
Johnston doesn’t care.
Jake tries to take it back, hold it in. He wants to pretend he isn’t crying, that his eyes are watering because of the weather, the lack of sleep, anything. But he’s back there again, with all the ghosts he’s been collecting over the years, and he can’t pretend anything. He has nothing to pretend with.
Johnston takes a breath, and Jakes braces himself for admonishments, for a list of all the ways he’s failed and going to fail next. He braces himself, and when Johnston finally speaks, the things he says lance down to Jake’s core.
Johnston sees. His father can see what he’s become.
Jake’s eyes are watering for other reasons too now, for shame and guilt, but also hope. When he looks up, Johnston’s shadow is a blanket and a safeguard for the first time in his life.