Fic: The Road Gone By (The Losers, Jensen)
Title: The Road Gone By
Author: Ladyjanelly
Fandom: The Losers
Pairing: None
Rating: R
Warnings: Takes place immediately after a violent assault and rape. Alcohol abuse, attempted non-con of an OC, references to prostitution, displaced anger and blame, PTSD, sleep-fighting,
Gratitude: To peaceful_sands and cougars_catnip for all their work and support. I had to go and fidget with things once they’d read, so if there are any errors left, they’re all mine.
Notes: This is the prequel to "Walk a While With Me" but you'll want to read this after that. http://archiveofourown.org/works/457182
He wakes up in the base’s infirmary, the taste of blood in his mouth and a gap where his eye tooth and first molar should be. He wakes to pain and shame, stitches holding his asshole together. He wants to reach down, to make sure all the parts of him are still there, but he can’t get up the nerve. He’s afraid. Considering how many times they kicked him in the crotch, and how hard…he can’t imagine they didn’t do some damage. He’ll check, but not now, not here. Not in the fucking infirmary where anyone can come in. Rows of hospital beds and just curtains for privacy between them and nothing for security at all. The voices of other soldiers, familiar soldiers, flirting with the nurses or calling out for more pain-killers.
He climbs out of bed, that first day. The catheter bag in one hand and the IV stand pushed along with him. He gets to the sharps box on the wall and fishes out a disposable scalpel. Something, anything, to have at hand if they come back for him. Bloodies his fingers getting the blade and hopes to god whoever it had been used on was clean.
He hides the weapon when the doctors come to examine him, come to explain what has been done to him. How his body has been beaten and torn and broken. One testicle ruptured and removed, teeth that will have to be replaced later.
His CO is the only one from his unit to visit. Stands there in his dress greens and offers him a way out. The chance to shut his mouth and write off three years of his life as a bad experiment. All he has to do is let them sweep the whole mess under the rug. Pretend it never happened, that they never hurt him.
Fuck them, fuck them all. He signs on the line, takes the other-than-honorable discharge they give him. Signs when he could fight, when he could file his own reports.
Six days later he limps out of the infirmary. Someone has dumped his things into a sack and brought them over so he doesn’t have to go back, doesn’t have to see their smug fucking faces any more. His clothes smell like piss and his laptop is in pieces. He sifts through the junk and even the hard-drive is busted. That’s okay though. Everything he really needs is in the cloud.
They left his wallet alone, the only thing not fucked with. They’ll regret that, he swears; they’ll regret all of it, from the first day he walked into that unit.
Getting out of the Army costs him. Signing bonuses that have to be returned, already sent to Teresa and spent years ago. He doesn’t ask about a payment plan, just empties his accounts. He never wants to give them another fucking thing. He calls a cab to pick him up at the gates and his last twenty dollars gets him to a truck-stop gas station. Broke and hungry, nobody to call. He can imagine his father, “What the hell have you fucked up this time?”
Nick would just have some excuse. No money, no time. His brother’s done one good thing for Jake in his entire damn life, and that a selfish accident. His expectations of help from Nick are so low it’s not worth wasting the phone call.
He thinks of calling Teresa, and tears prickle at his eyes. He stares up at the fluorescent lights until they’re dry again. He can’t. He won’t call her. Won’t have her spend money on him that she needs, raising a child with no partner in her life. She would come. He knows that. In a heart-beat she’d drop everything, pack Sophie up and drive to fucking Texas and he absolutely cannot have her see him like this.
He rubs a hand over his face and he waits. Pops another pain-killer when it hurts too much from sitting. The sun goes down and the neon comes on. There are less vacationing families and more long-haul truckers. Stopping for gas before they get close to the city. He watches to see who notices him, and picks one who looks bleary-eyed on the way back to his truck, monster-sized coffee cup in his hand.
“Hey,” Jake says, and he knows what he looks like. Face bruised up, half-crippled with limping, nothing in the world but the clothes on his back. “You heading North? I’ve got no cash to offer, but I’m a good talker and I’ll make sure you don’t fall asleep and go off the side of the road.”
The guy looks him up and down. Not like he’s having sexy-time thoughts, more contemplative than that.
“You got a name, soldier?” he asks and Jake smiles, eyes too wide and showing his missing teeth. Smiles even though he’d like to fucking spit on all things army.
“Jensen,” he says, “Jake Jensen.”
----------
He’s as good as his word and he keeps the driver, Dale, awake until they hit Dallas. He had checked, the one time he slipped onto the infirmary’s computer, and he knows the exit, where to ask Dale to pull over that he’ll be closest to where he needs to be.
The big truck hisses to a stop, rumbling in the night and Jake opens his door.
“Hey,” Dale says, and Jake pauses. “Here.”
Dale holds out his hand, a twenty between his fingers. Jake takes it, wary, but Dale doesn’t make a grab for him, just smiles sad and unsure. “A man fights for this country, he shouldn’t have to be hitchhiking to make his way,” Dale explains, and shrugs.
“Thanks,” Jake says, and for just a second his shell cracks. That this man, this stranger, thinks he’s a god damn hero, when so many others treat him like he’s dog shit. He clenches his jaw and nods and climbs out of the cab. Almost glad that so much of his stuff was ruined because he’s got a walk ahead of him. It looked so small on the screen, a run that he could have done in an hour, even with a fifty pound pack on his back.
How easy it would have been a month ago, when he was fit and strong.
Now his steps are slow and he needs another pill but he’s got nothing to swallow it with. He follows the cross-street east, between two huge office complexes and under another highway. There are homeless in the shadows of the overpass and Jake isn’t sure if he looks too dangerous or too poor for them to fuck with him as he staggers over the dried up flotsam of a flash-flood that clogs the sidewalk at the lowest point. He feels more than half-naked, walking without gun or dog-tags.
There are bright buildings on the other side of the dip, a children’s hospital with bright-lit signs and crisp landscaping and beyond that a gas station that’s open still.
He stumbles into the convenience store and the man behind the counter looks up at him with narrow eyes. “Bathroom’s for customers only,” and Jake flashes him the twenty that Dale gave him. He takes a piss and washes his face and drinks big gulps of sink-water from his hands. He takes a pill, glad for the four walls to keep anyone from seeing the prescription bottle he puts back in his pocket.
Finally, he pulls down his pants and sits down on the toilet. Closes his eyes for a moment while he gathers his courage and then looks down. It’s a surprise to see no blood in his underwear, but a relief too. This is the halfway point. If he’s made it this far and isn’t even bleeding yet, he’s sure he can accomplish his mission objectives.
He splurges in the convenience store. A package of chocolate-coated mini-donuts, Kit-Kats, a pudding cup and a bottle of water. He’d prefer a Gator-Aid, but his mouth isn’t up to the acid burn of it yet. There’s a spinning case of cheap-ass pocket-knives, overpriced at eight ninety-nine each and he points to the plainest of those and adds it to his purchase.
And then he starts walking again. Past a strip-mall and an old Catholic church, makes a left at the hotel from the early 1900s. He’s in a denser little downtown area now, small shops crowded together, all closed at this time of night (morning), but some have their display window lighting on still and he sees a lot of rainbows in the wind-chimes and knick-knacks. A gay bookstore and a leather shop stand side by side, and the flamboyance of the neighborhood wasn’t his goal in picking this exit, this objective, but it does make him feel safer, less exposed.
The library annex is a small building, a converted rent-an-office by the number of non-entry doors around the outside. Dawn’s still an hour away, so Jake finally lets himself sit, lets himself rest. Knees up and his arms crossed over them, forehead down and he breathes. He’s here. He’s not bleeding. He’s done his part; this has to work.
The jangle of keys wakes him and he lifts his head. A slight man in khakis and a pale blue button-down shirt is coming down the sidewalk with his keys out, but he hesitates at the sight of Jake. His free hand goes to the neon pink cannister of pepper spray on his key-chain and Jake holds up his hands.
“Hey, whoa. I’m just waiting to use the public computers,” he protests and the librarian relaxes some. Flicks his head Jake’s way in a clear request for space and Jake nods.
Getting up is a problem, his body stiff from sitting and he can’t stop the hiss of pain when he moves. For a second the librarian looks like he’ll ask What the hell happened to you? but he doesn’t, just unlocks the door and goes in, turning the bolt again until opening time.
---------------
J_mageddon: Hey, girl.
His heart pounds as he stares at the blinking cursor. It’s ten AM in Dallas so it should be eleven at Quantico. But she gets busy. Sometimes her team needs her. He tries to remember their last conversation, two weeks ago, maybe a little more than that. He wonders if she would have told him if she was planning a vacation. And shit, if she’s not in her lair for any reason he’s fucked, he’s so very very fucked.
Good_penny: J?
Jake shudders with relief. Thank God. Okay, so he and God are on sort of rough terms right now, but Penny being at her desk? A damn good start towards reconciliation.
Good_penny: What are you doing at a library?
His fingers hover over the keys. He wants to tell her, but where the fuck do you start a story like that? He clenches his hands into fists. Gives her a second to dig up the information she’s asking for on her own, knows her well enough to know she’s already looking. Easier this way than finding the words himself.
Good_penny: Oh.
Good_penny: Oh, honey.
Just words on a screen but they break him. He feels the tears welling up in his eyes, spilling before he can blink them back. No, he begs himself, Not here, not now.
Good_penny: J are you there?
J_mageddon: yeah
Good_penny: Sweety, what do you need?
She’s been his hacker-mom for ten years, mentoring him through his early coding days, through his childish prank phase, warning him when he started to become dangerous, raising the wrong flags at the wrong agencies. It was her who helped him land in the army instead of jail. He would do almost anything for her, and she’s already done almost everything for him. It ignites his last flare of shame, to ask for more, to ask for this.
J_mageddon: I’m fucked, henny-penny.
J_mageddon: I got nothing.
Good_penny: J how did this happen?
Good_penny: no, I see it. You still have your pp card?
His lips try to twitch into a smile. God-damn she’s good.
J_mageddon: I’ll pay you back. Swear to god.
J_mageddon: only if you can spare it.
Good_penny: done.
Good_penny: J
Good_penny: Buy a plane ticket. I’ve got a great couch to crash on
J_mageddon: you don’t know how tempting that is.
J_mageddon: but I’m not good right now. Maybe later when I get my
J_mageddon: shit worked out.
He throws open another window and checks his PayPal account. Fuck. Twenty-five hundred dollars.
J_mageddon: penny this is too much.
Good_penny: don’t you dare sent it back. You’ll just make pp rich when I give it to you again
J_mageddon: I swear I’ll pay you back.
J_mageddon: six weeks, tops.
Good_penny: I’m sorry J I gotta go
He knows she wouldn’t leave him like this unless she had a team in the field, needing her insta-research on what might be a life-or-death call.
J_mageddon: k
J_mageddon: see you soon
Good_penny: *has logged out*
He sits for a long time, for the rest of the twenty minutes he has the computer reserved for, just in case she comes back on. The little timer on the bottom left of the screen counts down the last seconds and then the screen goes blank. He stands and lets the next homeless guy have his turn.
He’s got work to do.
---------------
There’s a grocery store on the other side of the library. He buys a pay-as-you-go cell-phone there, and uses the ATM to pull his daily maximum. The taxi that comes is lime green and yellow, and the driver speaks English with such a thick accent that Jake talks to him in Turkic just because it’s easier to give directions. This apparently makes Jake almost-family and the driver is willing to wait outside the big-box electronics store while Jake picks up the things he needs. Laptop, the best he can afford, cellular modem, the very basics of the usual accessories and a multi-tool.
By the check-out counter there’s a display of 5-Hour Energy shots and he sweeps ten of them into his cart.
Of the twenty-five hundred that Penny gave him, he walks out with less than three hundred left in his pocket, but that’s okay. All he needs now is time. A place where nobody will bother him. He could go anywhere, but the corner of town he’s already walked seems more familiar and a better option than driving aimlessly and hoping to find something more suitable (not better, because he thinks he’d have a hard time finding worse).
The motel is a cinder-block box with a courtyard in the middle for cars to park. No name, no sign, just a plank of particle-board leaning on the wall that says “Vacancy.” Closer to the highway than the little down-town he’d been in that morning, but more affordable too. The line of the roof is crooked and mismatched air-conditioners stick out of the walls like the floating blocks on Super Mario. The office smells like an ashtray and looks about as clean.
“How much?” Jake asks the woman behind the counter, an older Latina with orange-dyed hair, fanning the sheen of sweat on her neck despite the valiant hum of the air-conditioner behind her. She looks him over with shrewd eyes.
“Twenty-five a night,” she tells him. The cab idles in the courtyard and near-family or not, Jake worries for his recent purchases.
“Two weeks,” he says, pulling out his cash. “Two hundred dollars.”
She hesitates only a second and then nods. “Si, si.” She snatches the money from his hand and tosses him the key to number eight.
He hurries out and thanks the driver for waiting, slips him a ten as a tip for helping him move his boxes into the room.
The interior is no surprise, but he’s stayed in worse before. Sagging mattress with a faded and stained comforter. A rickety table. Mold and rust stains in the corners of the shower.
He lines the boxes up on the bed and strips them open with swift efficiency. Gets the laptop powered up and running. He keeps Windows just long enough to connect with his cloud-storage and then he’s gutting the hard-drive, filling it with his own operating system, the codes and programs and cyphers he needs. He pirates some music while he’s working, not his usual hair-band rock, something louder, angrier. Harsh words and outrage pouring into his head-phones.
He breaks into the Army records first, looking to see if anything has changed with his old unit. Two requests for transfers out, the two guys he thought were least-likely to have participated. Or maybe just the two most-likely to feel guilty about it afterward. Still, he has plenty of targets to start with. Men whose voices he is sure he recognized. Taggart, who flirted with him and then fucked him over. Wilson, dumb as dirt but cruel as well. Haskell, screaming “Yeah, yeah,” as he kicked the shit out of him.
He starts small. Builds a couple faux porn-sites and then signs them up for premium accounts with automatic payments, directed to a shell account that he can pull from.
Fifty-two hours after he walked out of Fort Hood, he finally crashes, a chair in front of the door and the pocket knife open on the bedside table. He sleeps sixteen hours and wakes up starving. There are two pizza places nearby and neither will deliver to the motel he’s at. He gives the address of a shop down the street and packs up the laptop, waits on the curb for the pizza driver. He eats half a pizza on his way back to the motel.
He watches the ground on the walk, finds three screws on the way, dark with rust but one of them will probably do for what he needs. When he gets back to the motel he takes the thrift store special landscape painting down off of the wall over the bed and uses the pocket knife to cut a hole in the dry-wall. He uses the point of the knife to start a hole in the wooden studs about eight inches down in the hole and then screws one of the screws in with the multi-tool. It’s a tight fit and he tears his knuckles up on the insides of the wall, but when he’s done he can lower the laptop case into the hole, hang the strap on the screw and a thief searching his room would be pretty unlikely to find it. Better than being seen going in and out of the room with it or just leaving it sitting around.
When he’s done making the cache and eating the first pizza he starts breaking down the cardboard the computer came in, ripping up the labels and putting the rest into the pizza box for disposal. No sense in advertising that he has goods worth stealing by putting whole packages into the trash.
After that, Jake gets down to work. Figures up what they owe him. Pain and suffering, the signing bonus they took back. He creates a dozen supply companies over the next month, then he goes in under his CO’s login codes and starts ordering overpriced, inappropriate shit. Cases of party hats. Inflatable hippos. Shower radios.
When the sitting gets too much and the programs are doing their thing, he trains. Push-ups, sit-ups. He orders a pull-up bar off of the internet and installs it in the bathroom doorway. He gets all the things he needs sent to him: clothes, toiletries, Pocky and a pirate hat.
He leaves his room just once in that first month for something that isn’t food. He calls his cab-driver and gets a ride to the convention center for a gun show. Picks up a good knife with an ankle-sheath and a plain 9mm and a box of ammo. He’ll be damned if he’s caught unarmed again.
-------------
Someone is screaming. Jake’s fingers still on the keyboard. He’d thought it was part of the song, but it keeps going on and on, even when the next track starts.
Now that he’s heard it, he can’t stop hearing it. Can’t concentrate on what he’s doing. He takes a breath and his heart-rate starts to kick up.
Something heavy hits the other side of the wall beside him and the screaming gets louder, words now, “Stop! Stop! Don’t!”
Jake is on his feet before he thinks about it. Out the door before he even has a plan, the scorching Texas sun half-blinding him after so long in his room. He hits the door to number seven with his shoulder and it gives way with a sharp crack, the security chain ripping free of the frame inside, dragging the bracket clean out of the wall.
There is a man and a girl. He’s naked and her shirt is torn, blood on her face. Fury rushes through him at the sight.
“I am trying to work!” he roars, because anything else would be too close. The man just stares. Barely even gets his hands up before Jake is on him, grabbing him by the throat and slamming him into the wall. His right hand balls into a fist and then he stops. Just stops cold where he stands, because if he hits this man once, he’s going to keep hitting him, keep hitting him until the guy is dead.
He growls and drags the guy to the door, throws him buck-naked out into the gravel of the courtyard.
“Here,” the girl says and he nearly strikes out at her voice behind him. She holds out the man’s things with shaking hands and Jake takes them. Looks in the wallet and memorizes his name and then throws the mess of them at the guy.
“Go!” he yells and the man scrambles for his car, not even bothering to put on underwear before he’s peeling out of the parking lot.
Jake takes a deep breath. He’s okay. He is.
“Hey,” the girl says, and he jerks back before she can touch his arm.
“Keep it the fuck down,” he tells her and walks away, and god, he’s so damn angry, he’ll hit her if he doesn’t get a door between them quick. Stupid fucking kid, putting herself there, letting that happen to her.
His knuckles burn and the wall is dented and he punches it again to feel the unmuddled clarity of the strike.
He takes a deep breath then. If he keeps punching walls he’s going to break his hands and then he can’t type, which means he’ll lose valuable fucking-over time, and that’s just not acceptable, so he switches to push-ups, and that’s a good burn too, chest and arms on fire with the exertion.
A pounding on his door interrupts him and he gets up, wiping the carpet-crud on his boxers. Cops probably, he thinks, but it’s just the motel manager on the other side. He should have known that nobody here would call the police.
“What?” he asks, and she doesn’t blink at his anger.
“Broken door, fifty dollars,” she says and holds out her hand. He laughs and even to his own ears it sounds ugly.
“Security services, fifty dollars,” he counters with, annoyed at the interruption. He’s got better things do do. “No murder, no cops, no hassle.”
Her eyes narrow. “I’ll get the door, you put it up.” She points to the dented drywall behind him. “You fix that too.”
“Fine,” he growls, and she goes.
He closes the door and turns back to what he was doing. Movement in the room catches his eye, his own reflection in the mirror over the sink. His lips twitch. He looks like a crazy man, in his boxers and boots and nothing else, a month’s growth of beard on his face and his grown-out brush-cut sticking up at all angles. No wonder naked-man was so freaked out.
He stares at himself for long minutes and then sighs. Goes back to the laptop and sees that the latest transactions have processed through.
----------
Good_penny: J?
J_mageddon: hey.
Good_penny: J, what are you doing?
Good_penny: You’re attracting too much attention.
J_mageddon: I know what I’m doing
J_mageddon: I’m fine, Penny.
Good_penny: You’re not fine. You’re getting flagged.
Good_penny: you have to back off.
Good_penny: I know it sucks right now, but jail sucks worse, I promise.
Jake closes the chat window, marks himself as offline.
He stares at the e-mail on his screen. A whisper of warning into the wrong ear. His old unit’s next target. He could kill them all with this e-mail. Treason. Murder. He sits for a long time. Finger hovering over the mouse-button. Anger builds in him. At himself for how bad he wants to do this and at his own weakness for not being able to. At his team for making him want to do it.
He screams and rips the mouse from the computer, throws it to smash on the wall. It’s all he can do to not throw the computer after it.
Fuck.
He’s done. He’s just done.
-----------
He stops, because he’s not good at doing things half-way, not good at “a little bit.” He lets the automatic payments keep running, but he stops hacking into the captain’s expense account and ordering silly shit, he stops finding new and weirder porno magazines to subscribe Taggart and Wilson and the rest to. He sees that Haskell’s wife has filed for divorce, and he basks in that last flush of accomplishment.
And then he sleeps, because he’s gone way too long on too little. Lets himself sleep twelve hours and wakes up feeling like a new person. Like he’s free from his horrible, exhausting task. He showers in the sputtering luke-warm spray of the motel’s bathroom, washes himself until it runs as cool as tap-water in Texas in the summer ever gets.
He stares at himself in the mirror when he’s done. The beard has got to go, and he starts with the mustache, the curling hairs that are tickling his lips now, getting in the way when he eats his pizza. It leaves him looking like some sort of demented Amish guy, so he starts under the left side-burn and trims and shaves down. He gets almost to his chin and stops, hiding the unshorn half of his face behind his hand so he can see what it would look like on both sides. Funky, he decides and starts work on the right side. He kind of likes the tuft of curly beard on his chin without mustache. Not really a goatee. Different. He pulls on his pirate hat and decides to leave it for now.
It’s getting dark out so he changes into jeans and a black button-down shirt that has little threads of shiny running through it. He hides his computer and locks up the room and starts walking, tipping his pirate hat to the pair of whores that linger at the front of the motel.
“Gringo loco,” he hears one mutter behind him, and that’s okay. He’d rather be crazy than normal.
He walks the mile back to the little gay district, led by the thumping bass of the clubs and the flash of strobe lights as he gets closer. He hits the bar of the first one he gets to, orders “Something big and fruity with lots of vodka!” He feels good; he feels great. He’s gonna drink and party and get fucking laid.
He carries his huge pink drink through the club, flinching when other patrons bump into him or when a hand gropes at his bicep or shoulder or once his ass. The alcohol makes it easier. Knowing that the gay men outnumber any straights that may have come in to cause trouble, that helps too. Not alone, a voice in his head keeps whispering, you’re not alone.
He makes eye-contact, he flirts and smiles. Some guys are drawn to the pirate hat and some are put off by the teeth thing. He finds the happy medium in an older guy, a little soft around the middle and thin around the shoulders, but he lets Jake take him out back, lets Jake go to his knees on the alley-way ground and suck him off and it feels great to prove that he still can, that they haven’t taken this from him.
If he’s not hard that first time, he blames it on the booze and nothing more, because he’s okay. More than okay, he’s fine. Totally fine.
After, he walks back to his room, the ankle-sheath rubbing a sore spot against the side of his calf. He’s not so drunk that he forgets to lock the door and check that his laptop is still in place and then he crashes, sleeping sound through the night.
It’s after noon when he wakes, the room too bright and a headache pounding behind his eyes. He takes some aspirin and goes back to sleep until it’s dark outside. When he gets up for real, he starts a new list:
-vehicle
-dentist
-urologist
-call P
-call T
-direction?
He picks up a truck off of Craigslist for six hundred bucks. It overheats but doesn’t leak oil. Motors aren’t really his thing, but he can read a damn Chilton’s manual, how hard can it be? He spends a week working on it in front of his motel room, puts in a new radiator and water pump. His shoulders sunburn where his tank-top doesn’t cover and the guys at the club seem to appreciate the dark line of dirt under his nails. If they want to run with this fantasy that he’s a blue-collar guy with simple needs, he’s willing to play along with small words and calloused hands.
It takes three dentist visits and a couple of grand to get his teeth fixed up. One for a checkup and evaluation, one to get the posts implanted and one to get the new teeth attached. He feels more like a man when it’s done, his face more important to who he is than the missing testicle.
He trades blow-jobs and hand-jobs in in back-alleys and bathrooms, his fly unzipped just enough to get his dick out. Trick cards pile up beside his computer, a stack of faceless names that he couldn’t put with the nameless faces of the men he’s shared orgasms with.
He’s cruising for dick the night he meets Marco, a slim dark-haired boy standing at the bar. He checks for an over-21 bracelet and finds it, and that’s reassuring because he’s not interested in jail-bait. He makes his way through the crowd and leans in. He’s been working on his lines, struggling to overcome his teenage awkwardness that seems to have followed him into adult life.
He’s got one, and it’s been working so far, so he trots it out, “Hey, so, can I suck your dick?”
The boy chokes on his drink, eyes wide and Jake thumps him on the back.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to catch you on the inhale with that.”
The guy catches a breath and shakes his head, eyes watering but a smile on his lips and that has to count for something.
“No, it’s okay, I just wasn’t expecting…wow.”
Jake shrugs and grins and gives him the “So? Can I?” waggle of his eyebrows.
“I don’t even know your name,” the pretty-boy says and Jake shrugs. It’s more than he usually shares.
“Jake,” he says, and then because he wasn’t raised in a barn, he offers his hand.
“Marco,” the man says, “So ah, not to turn down a blow-job, but you want to go have coffee or something first?”
It’s the first date of Jake’s life, sitting at Cafe Brazil and sipping the Kona. They get around to the blow-job, in Marco’s bed, slow and easy and sweet. Marco is the first man that he lets touch him, and Jake’s almost unbearably grateful that he doesn’t freak out about his uni-ball.
They lay there and talk, after, chatting for hours about nothing at all. Jake smiles sadly when it’s time to go.
“Hey, so, can I see you again?” Marco asks, and Jake gives him his cell phone number.
Marco is awesome, he’s perfect. Jake is a genius; he can figure this boy-friend thing out. He plans and executes perfect-boyfriend displays of affection-flowers to Marco’s work, concert tickets under his door, just-thinking-of-you e-mails and text-messages(he writes an app for it, to keep track of frequency and remind him if he is below the designated threshold).
Four months after the worst day of Jake’s life, he asks Marco to fuck him and it isn’t horrible.
He does everything in his power to make it work, and the one thing he can’t give is the one thing Marco can’t live without.
“Are you closeted?” Marco asks him one night when he tries to leave, “Are you hiding a wife? A girl-friend? Am I just a quick fuck to you?”
There’s nothing Jake can tell him, no way to say “I really like you but don’t trust you.” No way to tell him the very idea makes his skin crawl.
“Be here,” Marco says into Jake’s silence, pulling him close, nuzzling in against his chest. “Be here for me when I go to sleep, when I wake up. It’s all I ask.”
Jake takes his jeans back off and stretches out on Marco’s bed, lies beside him and runs code in his head as Marco’s body goes lax, as his breathing evens out.
The alarm clock goes off six hours later and it’s the most wonderful sound Jake’s ever heard, boredom eating away at his calm. Marco gets up to go to work and Jake goes back to his motel room. He gets two hours sleep before his land-lady bangs on the door to wake him up to fix the door to number seven.
The work is oddly soothing. Painting the cheap wood, installing new molding on the inside of the frame, hanging the hinges. Fixing instead of breaking.
He goes to Marco’s when he’s done. They try to cook dinner together but only succeed in making a mess of the kitchen and an inedible pan full of glop on the stove. Jake takes him out to eat instead, and then they come back to Marco’s place to snuggle on the couch and watch TV.
“I should…” Jake tries to say when the show is over, but Marco grabs him by the hand and leads him to bed. He tries to stay awake, but laying there is the most boring thing ever. If he was on watch, he would get up and walk around, but he can’t. He drowses, startling awake and biting his lip to try to keep himself there. At the first light of dawn he nudges Marco awake, whispers “I’ve gotta go, I need an early start on the day,” and Marco is too sleepy to call him on the lie.
He drives back to the motel, lucky as hell he doesn’t get pulled over for drunk-driving despite being stone-cold sober.
He just means to check his e-mail when he gets back, but there’s a note from Penny, asking his help with a pesky string of encrypted code. He sets a couple programs running on it, and she wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important so he watches until they’re done and he can send her the results.
Marco calls as he’s coming out of the shower and they go out early, dancing and drinking and then back to Marco’s place for a long hard fuck.
Jake is so tired when it’s over, as the endorphins flood his system and his body feels languid, tired. He needs to go, but when he reaches for his pants he gets Marco’s frown, the threat of a pout, and he backs down, planning to stay just long enough for Marco to fall asleep.
He doesn’t remember it happening. One second he’s waiting for his chance to slip away. The next he’s kneeling on the floor beside the bed, Marco under him, blood on the younger man’s face, Jake’s fingers around his throat. He jerks away, scrambles back to the wall in blind panic.
“What the fuck!” Marco screams at him, “What the fuck is wrong with you? My god, you freak!”
Marco holds his nose and Jake wants to see if it’s broken, wants to drive him to a hospital, but the naked fury on his face turns him back.
“Get out!” Marco yells, “Don’t come back, do you understand me? Don’t you ever fucking come back!”
Jake grabs his clothes and gets dressed in the stairwell. Fuck. He knew it wouldn’t be good; he just hadn’t imagined it would be that bad. So close. Jesus, he could have killed Marco.
He stumbles to the truck and drives.
It feels like the middle of the night, but the bars are still open as he pulls through Oak Lawn on his way back to the motel. 1AM-enough time to have a drink before closing time and he’s close enough that he can walk home, pick up the truck in the morning.
The first shot goes down hard around the lump in his throat; he has a second to ease the ache, a third because he’s right on the edge between buzzed and drunk, a fourth because he can feel the comfort of numbness, so tantalizingly close.
He loses track then, bouncing between the dance floor and the bar, throwing himself into both in search of oblivion.
------------
Fear. Darkness. Rough hands shoving him around. The string of the bag tight around his throat. Raw. Sore. Fabric over his face, thick, suffocating.
Jake wakes up to the tiled ceiling, antiseptic smell and muted beeps of a hospital room. He lays there for long moments, trying to separate his memories of the night before from the dream. He remembers last call, sort of, and the lights coming on at closing time. Stumbling out, keys in hand. Struggling with the lock on his truck.
Oh God, he thinks, and bolts upright in bed. His stomach roils and he retches.
“Hey,” a woman’s voice soothes, and a barf-bowl is held out under his face. Her nails are pink with tiny black polka-dots, and she smells like vanilla perfume.
“Did I kill anybody?” he asks between heaves as his stomach tries in vain to expel anything at all. “Please tell me I didn’t kill anybody.”
He looks up at the woman, cute and round and tiny, yellow-blond hair and lipstick that matches her nails (minus the dots). He’s never seen her before, but he can see the concern in her eyes.
“You didn’t kill anybody, J.”
“Penny?” he asks, and she hands him a tissue to blot the spit off of his lips.
Her smile is kind. “Yeah, J.”
“You came? For me? How…what?”
She snorts. “You think you could slip a hospital admission past the office of unmitigated omniscience?”
He swallows and lies back. She settles into the hard plastic chair at his bedside.
“What happened?” he asks, because he doesn’t feel like he’s been in a wreck. He’s achy and his throat is sore as hell, but otherwise no bumps or bruises.
“They found you on the ground by your truck,” she says, and he flinches at the scolding tone. “You had alcohol poisoning, and you’re lucky you didn’t drown on your own vomit.”
“But I didn’t drive,” he says, closing his eyes and thanking god for small miracles.
“Not for lack of trying, J. Look.” She takes a deep breath and Jake braces himself. “You can’t keep doing this, do you understand? You have to eat and sleep and not try to drink yourself to death. You have to stop messing around on DD servers. You have to stop playing chicken with the IT security guys. They caught me, they’ll catch you too, eventually.”
Her hand grips his tight where it rests on the hospital sheets. “You have to do something else, J. Find something that makes you happy instead of burning up your life like this. Don’t let Teresa get a call saying you’re dead or in jail.”
His eyes prickle and he brings a shaky hand up to press against them.
“That’s low,” he croaks, his throat too tight. “Bringing ‘Resa into this.”
“Good,” Penny tells him. “If it hurts, maybe you’ll listen.”
“I’m listening,” he whispers, and he is. He doesn’t want to do that to the people he still loves-Penny and Teresa and Sophie. He doesn’t want to die or go to jail. He holds Penny’s hand and leaves his eyes closed.
“Oh, sweetie,” she murmurs once, but stays at his side until the doctor makes his rounds a little later.
They release him after a couple hours, with a warning to not drink any alcohol at all for the next few days. Penny’s ready to get something to eat. They take a cab back to his hotel so he can check on his stuff. She takes one look at the place and shakes her head.
“This is sad, J. Sad and ugly and I looked at your finances and I know you can do better.”
She waves her hand imperiously and he goes in, gathers his stuff into pillowcases off of the bed (and okay, maybe he can add an on-line shopping addiction to the list of new problems he’s gained since The Incident). He plops the pirate hat on his head and exits the room with a jaunty grin. Penny’s eyes narrow behind the cab’s window, and he knows she’s not buying it for a minute.
He puts his stuff in the cab’s trunk and heads to the office. “Hey, I’m done with the room,” he tells his pain-in-the-ass landlady and she barely looks up from her magazine. He pulls a couple of bills out of his wallet, enough to pay for the hole in the wall when she finds it and the linens he’s unapologetically stolen and leaves them on the counter. He turns to go and her hand snakes out to take the cash.
He gets in the cab and they drive. He’s always thought of himself as independent, but having Penny with him, even for the two days she’s able to stay, it helps. She gets a hotel room and he settles into an executive suite, sort of an up-scale, furnished efficiency apartment type thing. There’s a pool, hot-tub, and work-out room downstairs. A concierge at the front desk at all times, day and night.
His neighbors come through in suit and tie, or in power-skirts with heels to match, and he knows he’ll at least shower on a regular basis in that sort of environment.
They spend the time Penny has in town exploring the city together, one restaurant at a time. She wants to go to the zoo but he talks her down to the aquarium instead and they spend an afternoon in the air-conditioning, watching the giant otter skim around her tank, the manatees floating aimlessly, the tiny sloth eating slices of apples from its long curved claws.
He hugs her goodbye at the airport, and thinks if he’d ever been attracted to women at all that he’d be halfway to in love with her by now.
He honestly expects the restless aching need to burn something down, even if it’s himself, to return as soon as she’s gone, but he keeps it in check. He eases back, slows down. Wakes up in the morning and goes to bed before midnight. Some days he just wants to drink and fuck and fight until there’s nothing left of him. He runs it off instead, or swims laps at the pool, does endless sets on the resistance machines in the gym.
Out of curiosity more than anything, he puts together a resume and shops it around to see what nibbles. He doesn’t have much hope on that front. All of his job skills are self-taught or gained in the military where his exit record stains everything it touches. He gets a couple inquiries for call-center jobs, help-desks, house-call installation and trouble-shooting.
He’ll be damned if he spends the next year of his life asking “Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?” so he starts looking further afield.
When his funds start to run low he gets a lead from Penny, a huge IT security firm that’s releasing its newest system and paying white-hat hackers to show them the flaws in it. He is awake for sixty hours straight on opening day and makes sixty thousand dollars in bounties. They offer him a job on the spot, but he realizes he isn’t ready for life behind a desk.
If he keeps the money on hand he knows he’s gonna blow through it. A real-estate sign in the yard of one of the houses he drives past between Oak Lawn and the executive suites catches his eye and he spiffies up his credit rating and then calls.
It’s a fixer-upper, but he goes through it with the home inspector and it’s all cosmetic stuff. Paint and carpet, some tile, a little plumbing he’ll need help with.
He puts the bare minimum down and moves in, buys some tools and starts working. He goes to sleep sore every night, too tired for dreams, and wakes to a new day and new challenges.
He calls Teresa, one night on the edge of autumn. She cries and curses at him, for disappearing without a word, for letting her worry. She hangs up on him the first time, and the second. He’s not above groveling and knows he deserves every bit of her anger. The third time he calls she lets him talk. About nothing. The house, his truck, how Sophie is doing in pre-school.
He still has a family, and that’s more important to him than anything.
--------
He works on his house and he plays around on-line, just enough to keep in practice. Finding Dale is a bitch since the license plate he’d seen was just for the trailer, not the truck. He has to sift through tons of shipping-company records, collating HR data with routes and times, but he finally tracks him down. Dale and his wife have had a baby, and are trying to buy a house. Jake smiles and repairs some flaws in his credit score, shaves off about thirty percent of their unpaid medical bills. It still doesn’t feel like enough to pay the man back for that one moment of desperately needed kindness, but it’s a start.
He eats out almost every meal, goes to a bar or club at least once every weekend. He flirts but doesn’t go home with anyone. He drinks, but never more than a couple beers. He’s friendly but doesn’t make friends.
The loneliness starts to get to him, and he thinks about dumping the half-finished house, heading north to bug Teresa for a while, but then she gets this new boyfriend she’s crazy about and he’d just be in the way, being her husband and all.
“Take a class,” Penny tells him one night on the phone, and the next day there’s an ad on the radio, the Army Reserves, touting the GI Bill. He busts into the Army’s finances one last time, calculates every cent they should owe him, and has it transfered to his offshore account.
Then he starts trying to come up with the most outrageous, subversive classes he could take on Uncle Sam’s dime. Basket-weaving? Fine art graffiti?
He’s sitting in a salon chair getting his hair cut, the adorable little guy behind him chatting away as he snips Jake’s hair when it hits him. He’s a clever guy, good with his hands. It’s just hair, how hard can it be?
Jake meets the stylist’s eye in the mirror and grins.
“So where’d you learn to do this, anyway?”
Author: Ladyjanelly
Fandom: The Losers
Pairing: None
Rating: R
Warnings: Takes place immediately after a violent assault and rape. Alcohol abuse, attempted non-con of an OC, references to prostitution, displaced anger and blame, PTSD, sleep-fighting,
Gratitude: To peaceful_sands and cougars_catnip for all their work and support. I had to go and fidget with things once they’d read, so if there are any errors left, they’re all mine.
Notes: This is the prequel to "Walk a While With Me" but you'll want to read this after that. http://archiveofourown.org/works/457182
He wakes up in the base’s infirmary, the taste of blood in his mouth and a gap where his eye tooth and first molar should be. He wakes to pain and shame, stitches holding his asshole together. He wants to reach down, to make sure all the parts of him are still there, but he can’t get up the nerve. He’s afraid. Considering how many times they kicked him in the crotch, and how hard…he can’t imagine they didn’t do some damage. He’ll check, but not now, not here. Not in the fucking infirmary where anyone can come in. Rows of hospital beds and just curtains for privacy between them and nothing for security at all. The voices of other soldiers, familiar soldiers, flirting with the nurses or calling out for more pain-killers.
He climbs out of bed, that first day. The catheter bag in one hand and the IV stand pushed along with him. He gets to the sharps box on the wall and fishes out a disposable scalpel. Something, anything, to have at hand if they come back for him. Bloodies his fingers getting the blade and hopes to god whoever it had been used on was clean.
He hides the weapon when the doctors come to examine him, come to explain what has been done to him. How his body has been beaten and torn and broken. One testicle ruptured and removed, teeth that will have to be replaced later.
His CO is the only one from his unit to visit. Stands there in his dress greens and offers him a way out. The chance to shut his mouth and write off three years of his life as a bad experiment. All he has to do is let them sweep the whole mess under the rug. Pretend it never happened, that they never hurt him.
Fuck them, fuck them all. He signs on the line, takes the other-than-honorable discharge they give him. Signs when he could fight, when he could file his own reports.
Six days later he limps out of the infirmary. Someone has dumped his things into a sack and brought them over so he doesn’t have to go back, doesn’t have to see their smug fucking faces any more. His clothes smell like piss and his laptop is in pieces. He sifts through the junk and even the hard-drive is busted. That’s okay though. Everything he really needs is in the cloud.
They left his wallet alone, the only thing not fucked with. They’ll regret that, he swears; they’ll regret all of it, from the first day he walked into that unit.
Getting out of the Army costs him. Signing bonuses that have to be returned, already sent to Teresa and spent years ago. He doesn’t ask about a payment plan, just empties his accounts. He never wants to give them another fucking thing. He calls a cab to pick him up at the gates and his last twenty dollars gets him to a truck-stop gas station. Broke and hungry, nobody to call. He can imagine his father, “What the hell have you fucked up this time?”
Nick would just have some excuse. No money, no time. His brother’s done one good thing for Jake in his entire damn life, and that a selfish accident. His expectations of help from Nick are so low it’s not worth wasting the phone call.
He thinks of calling Teresa, and tears prickle at his eyes. He stares up at the fluorescent lights until they’re dry again. He can’t. He won’t call her. Won’t have her spend money on him that she needs, raising a child with no partner in her life. She would come. He knows that. In a heart-beat she’d drop everything, pack Sophie up and drive to fucking Texas and he absolutely cannot have her see him like this.
He rubs a hand over his face and he waits. Pops another pain-killer when it hurts too much from sitting. The sun goes down and the neon comes on. There are less vacationing families and more long-haul truckers. Stopping for gas before they get close to the city. He watches to see who notices him, and picks one who looks bleary-eyed on the way back to his truck, monster-sized coffee cup in his hand.
“Hey,” Jake says, and he knows what he looks like. Face bruised up, half-crippled with limping, nothing in the world but the clothes on his back. “You heading North? I’ve got no cash to offer, but I’m a good talker and I’ll make sure you don’t fall asleep and go off the side of the road.”
The guy looks him up and down. Not like he’s having sexy-time thoughts, more contemplative than that.
“You got a name, soldier?” he asks and Jake smiles, eyes too wide and showing his missing teeth. Smiles even though he’d like to fucking spit on all things army.
“Jensen,” he says, “Jake Jensen.”
----------
He’s as good as his word and he keeps the driver, Dale, awake until they hit Dallas. He had checked, the one time he slipped onto the infirmary’s computer, and he knows the exit, where to ask Dale to pull over that he’ll be closest to where he needs to be.
The big truck hisses to a stop, rumbling in the night and Jake opens his door.
“Hey,” Dale says, and Jake pauses. “Here.”
Dale holds out his hand, a twenty between his fingers. Jake takes it, wary, but Dale doesn’t make a grab for him, just smiles sad and unsure. “A man fights for this country, he shouldn’t have to be hitchhiking to make his way,” Dale explains, and shrugs.
“Thanks,” Jake says, and for just a second his shell cracks. That this man, this stranger, thinks he’s a god damn hero, when so many others treat him like he’s dog shit. He clenches his jaw and nods and climbs out of the cab. Almost glad that so much of his stuff was ruined because he’s got a walk ahead of him. It looked so small on the screen, a run that he could have done in an hour, even with a fifty pound pack on his back.
How easy it would have been a month ago, when he was fit and strong.
Now his steps are slow and he needs another pill but he’s got nothing to swallow it with. He follows the cross-street east, between two huge office complexes and under another highway. There are homeless in the shadows of the overpass and Jake isn’t sure if he looks too dangerous or too poor for them to fuck with him as he staggers over the dried up flotsam of a flash-flood that clogs the sidewalk at the lowest point. He feels more than half-naked, walking without gun or dog-tags.
There are bright buildings on the other side of the dip, a children’s hospital with bright-lit signs and crisp landscaping and beyond that a gas station that’s open still.
He stumbles into the convenience store and the man behind the counter looks up at him with narrow eyes. “Bathroom’s for customers only,” and Jake flashes him the twenty that Dale gave him. He takes a piss and washes his face and drinks big gulps of sink-water from his hands. He takes a pill, glad for the four walls to keep anyone from seeing the prescription bottle he puts back in his pocket.
Finally, he pulls down his pants and sits down on the toilet. Closes his eyes for a moment while he gathers his courage and then looks down. It’s a surprise to see no blood in his underwear, but a relief too. This is the halfway point. If he’s made it this far and isn’t even bleeding yet, he’s sure he can accomplish his mission objectives.
He splurges in the convenience store. A package of chocolate-coated mini-donuts, Kit-Kats, a pudding cup and a bottle of water. He’d prefer a Gator-Aid, but his mouth isn’t up to the acid burn of it yet. There’s a spinning case of cheap-ass pocket-knives, overpriced at eight ninety-nine each and he points to the plainest of those and adds it to his purchase.
And then he starts walking again. Past a strip-mall and an old Catholic church, makes a left at the hotel from the early 1900s. He’s in a denser little downtown area now, small shops crowded together, all closed at this time of night (morning), but some have their display window lighting on still and he sees a lot of rainbows in the wind-chimes and knick-knacks. A gay bookstore and a leather shop stand side by side, and the flamboyance of the neighborhood wasn’t his goal in picking this exit, this objective, but it does make him feel safer, less exposed.
The library annex is a small building, a converted rent-an-office by the number of non-entry doors around the outside. Dawn’s still an hour away, so Jake finally lets himself sit, lets himself rest. Knees up and his arms crossed over them, forehead down and he breathes. He’s here. He’s not bleeding. He’s done his part; this has to work.
The jangle of keys wakes him and he lifts his head. A slight man in khakis and a pale blue button-down shirt is coming down the sidewalk with his keys out, but he hesitates at the sight of Jake. His free hand goes to the neon pink cannister of pepper spray on his key-chain and Jake holds up his hands.
“Hey, whoa. I’m just waiting to use the public computers,” he protests and the librarian relaxes some. Flicks his head Jake’s way in a clear request for space and Jake nods.
Getting up is a problem, his body stiff from sitting and he can’t stop the hiss of pain when he moves. For a second the librarian looks like he’ll ask What the hell happened to you? but he doesn’t, just unlocks the door and goes in, turning the bolt again until opening time.
---------------
J_mageddon: Hey, girl.
His heart pounds as he stares at the blinking cursor. It’s ten AM in Dallas so it should be eleven at Quantico. But she gets busy. Sometimes her team needs her. He tries to remember their last conversation, two weeks ago, maybe a little more than that. He wonders if she would have told him if she was planning a vacation. And shit, if she’s not in her lair for any reason he’s fucked, he’s so very very fucked.
Good_penny: J?
Jake shudders with relief. Thank God. Okay, so he and God are on sort of rough terms right now, but Penny being at her desk? A damn good start towards reconciliation.
Good_penny: What are you doing at a library?
His fingers hover over the keys. He wants to tell her, but where the fuck do you start a story like that? He clenches his hands into fists. Gives her a second to dig up the information she’s asking for on her own, knows her well enough to know she’s already looking. Easier this way than finding the words himself.
Good_penny: Oh.
Good_penny: Oh, honey.
Just words on a screen but they break him. He feels the tears welling up in his eyes, spilling before he can blink them back. No, he begs himself, Not here, not now.
Good_penny: J are you there?
J_mageddon: yeah
Good_penny: Sweety, what do you need?
She’s been his hacker-mom for ten years, mentoring him through his early coding days, through his childish prank phase, warning him when he started to become dangerous, raising the wrong flags at the wrong agencies. It was her who helped him land in the army instead of jail. He would do almost anything for her, and she’s already done almost everything for him. It ignites his last flare of shame, to ask for more, to ask for this.
J_mageddon: I’m fucked, henny-penny.
J_mageddon: I got nothing.
Good_penny: J how did this happen?
Good_penny: no, I see it. You still have your pp card?
His lips try to twitch into a smile. God-damn she’s good.
J_mageddon: I’ll pay you back. Swear to god.
J_mageddon: only if you can spare it.
Good_penny: done.
Good_penny: J
Good_penny: Buy a plane ticket. I’ve got a great couch to crash on
J_mageddon: you don’t know how tempting that is.
J_mageddon: but I’m not good right now. Maybe later when I get my
J_mageddon: shit worked out.
He throws open another window and checks his PayPal account. Fuck. Twenty-five hundred dollars.
J_mageddon: penny this is too much.
Good_penny: don’t you dare sent it back. You’ll just make pp rich when I give it to you again
J_mageddon: I swear I’ll pay you back.
J_mageddon: six weeks, tops.
Good_penny: I’m sorry J I gotta go
He knows she wouldn’t leave him like this unless she had a team in the field, needing her insta-research on what might be a life-or-death call.
J_mageddon: k
J_mageddon: see you soon
Good_penny: *has logged out*
He sits for a long time, for the rest of the twenty minutes he has the computer reserved for, just in case she comes back on. The little timer on the bottom left of the screen counts down the last seconds and then the screen goes blank. He stands and lets the next homeless guy have his turn.
He’s got work to do.
---------------
There’s a grocery store on the other side of the library. He buys a pay-as-you-go cell-phone there, and uses the ATM to pull his daily maximum. The taxi that comes is lime green and yellow, and the driver speaks English with such a thick accent that Jake talks to him in Turkic just because it’s easier to give directions. This apparently makes Jake almost-family and the driver is willing to wait outside the big-box electronics store while Jake picks up the things he needs. Laptop, the best he can afford, cellular modem, the very basics of the usual accessories and a multi-tool.
By the check-out counter there’s a display of 5-Hour Energy shots and he sweeps ten of them into his cart.
Of the twenty-five hundred that Penny gave him, he walks out with less than three hundred left in his pocket, but that’s okay. All he needs now is time. A place where nobody will bother him. He could go anywhere, but the corner of town he’s already walked seems more familiar and a better option than driving aimlessly and hoping to find something more suitable (not better, because he thinks he’d have a hard time finding worse).
The motel is a cinder-block box with a courtyard in the middle for cars to park. No name, no sign, just a plank of particle-board leaning on the wall that says “Vacancy.” Closer to the highway than the little down-town he’d been in that morning, but more affordable too. The line of the roof is crooked and mismatched air-conditioners stick out of the walls like the floating blocks on Super Mario. The office smells like an ashtray and looks about as clean.
“How much?” Jake asks the woman behind the counter, an older Latina with orange-dyed hair, fanning the sheen of sweat on her neck despite the valiant hum of the air-conditioner behind her. She looks him over with shrewd eyes.
“Twenty-five a night,” she tells him. The cab idles in the courtyard and near-family or not, Jake worries for his recent purchases.
“Two weeks,” he says, pulling out his cash. “Two hundred dollars.”
She hesitates only a second and then nods. “Si, si.” She snatches the money from his hand and tosses him the key to number eight.
He hurries out and thanks the driver for waiting, slips him a ten as a tip for helping him move his boxes into the room.
The interior is no surprise, but he’s stayed in worse before. Sagging mattress with a faded and stained comforter. A rickety table. Mold and rust stains in the corners of the shower.
He lines the boxes up on the bed and strips them open with swift efficiency. Gets the laptop powered up and running. He keeps Windows just long enough to connect with his cloud-storage and then he’s gutting the hard-drive, filling it with his own operating system, the codes and programs and cyphers he needs. He pirates some music while he’s working, not his usual hair-band rock, something louder, angrier. Harsh words and outrage pouring into his head-phones.
He breaks into the Army records first, looking to see if anything has changed with his old unit. Two requests for transfers out, the two guys he thought were least-likely to have participated. Or maybe just the two most-likely to feel guilty about it afterward. Still, he has plenty of targets to start with. Men whose voices he is sure he recognized. Taggart, who flirted with him and then fucked him over. Wilson, dumb as dirt but cruel as well. Haskell, screaming “Yeah, yeah,” as he kicked the shit out of him.
He starts small. Builds a couple faux porn-sites and then signs them up for premium accounts with automatic payments, directed to a shell account that he can pull from.
Fifty-two hours after he walked out of Fort Hood, he finally crashes, a chair in front of the door and the pocket knife open on the bedside table. He sleeps sixteen hours and wakes up starving. There are two pizza places nearby and neither will deliver to the motel he’s at. He gives the address of a shop down the street and packs up the laptop, waits on the curb for the pizza driver. He eats half a pizza on his way back to the motel.
He watches the ground on the walk, finds three screws on the way, dark with rust but one of them will probably do for what he needs. When he gets back to the motel he takes the thrift store special landscape painting down off of the wall over the bed and uses the pocket knife to cut a hole in the dry-wall. He uses the point of the knife to start a hole in the wooden studs about eight inches down in the hole and then screws one of the screws in with the multi-tool. It’s a tight fit and he tears his knuckles up on the insides of the wall, but when he’s done he can lower the laptop case into the hole, hang the strap on the screw and a thief searching his room would be pretty unlikely to find it. Better than being seen going in and out of the room with it or just leaving it sitting around.
When he’s done making the cache and eating the first pizza he starts breaking down the cardboard the computer came in, ripping up the labels and putting the rest into the pizza box for disposal. No sense in advertising that he has goods worth stealing by putting whole packages into the trash.
After that, Jake gets down to work. Figures up what they owe him. Pain and suffering, the signing bonus they took back. He creates a dozen supply companies over the next month, then he goes in under his CO’s login codes and starts ordering overpriced, inappropriate shit. Cases of party hats. Inflatable hippos. Shower radios.
When the sitting gets too much and the programs are doing their thing, he trains. Push-ups, sit-ups. He orders a pull-up bar off of the internet and installs it in the bathroom doorway. He gets all the things he needs sent to him: clothes, toiletries, Pocky and a pirate hat.
He leaves his room just once in that first month for something that isn’t food. He calls his cab-driver and gets a ride to the convention center for a gun show. Picks up a good knife with an ankle-sheath and a plain 9mm and a box of ammo. He’ll be damned if he’s caught unarmed again.
-------------
Someone is screaming. Jake’s fingers still on the keyboard. He’d thought it was part of the song, but it keeps going on and on, even when the next track starts.
Now that he’s heard it, he can’t stop hearing it. Can’t concentrate on what he’s doing. He takes a breath and his heart-rate starts to kick up.
Something heavy hits the other side of the wall beside him and the screaming gets louder, words now, “Stop! Stop! Don’t!”
Jake is on his feet before he thinks about it. Out the door before he even has a plan, the scorching Texas sun half-blinding him after so long in his room. He hits the door to number seven with his shoulder and it gives way with a sharp crack, the security chain ripping free of the frame inside, dragging the bracket clean out of the wall.
There is a man and a girl. He’s naked and her shirt is torn, blood on her face. Fury rushes through him at the sight.
“I am trying to work!” he roars, because anything else would be too close. The man just stares. Barely even gets his hands up before Jake is on him, grabbing him by the throat and slamming him into the wall. His right hand balls into a fist and then he stops. Just stops cold where he stands, because if he hits this man once, he’s going to keep hitting him, keep hitting him until the guy is dead.
He growls and drags the guy to the door, throws him buck-naked out into the gravel of the courtyard.
“Here,” the girl says and he nearly strikes out at her voice behind him. She holds out the man’s things with shaking hands and Jake takes them. Looks in the wallet and memorizes his name and then throws the mess of them at the guy.
“Go!” he yells and the man scrambles for his car, not even bothering to put on underwear before he’s peeling out of the parking lot.
Jake takes a deep breath. He’s okay. He is.
“Hey,” the girl says, and he jerks back before she can touch his arm.
“Keep it the fuck down,” he tells her and walks away, and god, he’s so damn angry, he’ll hit her if he doesn’t get a door between them quick. Stupid fucking kid, putting herself there, letting that happen to her.
His knuckles burn and the wall is dented and he punches it again to feel the unmuddled clarity of the strike.
He takes a deep breath then. If he keeps punching walls he’s going to break his hands and then he can’t type, which means he’ll lose valuable fucking-over time, and that’s just not acceptable, so he switches to push-ups, and that’s a good burn too, chest and arms on fire with the exertion.
A pounding on his door interrupts him and he gets up, wiping the carpet-crud on his boxers. Cops probably, he thinks, but it’s just the motel manager on the other side. He should have known that nobody here would call the police.
“What?” he asks, and she doesn’t blink at his anger.
“Broken door, fifty dollars,” she says and holds out her hand. He laughs and even to his own ears it sounds ugly.
“Security services, fifty dollars,” he counters with, annoyed at the interruption. He’s got better things do do. “No murder, no cops, no hassle.”
Her eyes narrow. “I’ll get the door, you put it up.” She points to the dented drywall behind him. “You fix that too.”
“Fine,” he growls, and she goes.
He closes the door and turns back to what he was doing. Movement in the room catches his eye, his own reflection in the mirror over the sink. His lips twitch. He looks like a crazy man, in his boxers and boots and nothing else, a month’s growth of beard on his face and his grown-out brush-cut sticking up at all angles. No wonder naked-man was so freaked out.
He stares at himself for long minutes and then sighs. Goes back to the laptop and sees that the latest transactions have processed through.
----------
Good_penny: J?
J_mageddon: hey.
Good_penny: J, what are you doing?
Good_penny: You’re attracting too much attention.
J_mageddon: I know what I’m doing
J_mageddon: I’m fine, Penny.
Good_penny: You’re not fine. You’re getting flagged.
Good_penny: you have to back off.
Good_penny: I know it sucks right now, but jail sucks worse, I promise.
Jake closes the chat window, marks himself as offline.
He stares at the e-mail on his screen. A whisper of warning into the wrong ear. His old unit’s next target. He could kill them all with this e-mail. Treason. Murder. He sits for a long time. Finger hovering over the mouse-button. Anger builds in him. At himself for how bad he wants to do this and at his own weakness for not being able to. At his team for making him want to do it.
He screams and rips the mouse from the computer, throws it to smash on the wall. It’s all he can do to not throw the computer after it.
Fuck.
He’s done. He’s just done.
-----------
He stops, because he’s not good at doing things half-way, not good at “a little bit.” He lets the automatic payments keep running, but he stops hacking into the captain’s expense account and ordering silly shit, he stops finding new and weirder porno magazines to subscribe Taggart and Wilson and the rest to. He sees that Haskell’s wife has filed for divorce, and he basks in that last flush of accomplishment.
And then he sleeps, because he’s gone way too long on too little. Lets himself sleep twelve hours and wakes up feeling like a new person. Like he’s free from his horrible, exhausting task. He showers in the sputtering luke-warm spray of the motel’s bathroom, washes himself until it runs as cool as tap-water in Texas in the summer ever gets.
He stares at himself in the mirror when he’s done. The beard has got to go, and he starts with the mustache, the curling hairs that are tickling his lips now, getting in the way when he eats his pizza. It leaves him looking like some sort of demented Amish guy, so he starts under the left side-burn and trims and shaves down. He gets almost to his chin and stops, hiding the unshorn half of his face behind his hand so he can see what it would look like on both sides. Funky, he decides and starts work on the right side. He kind of likes the tuft of curly beard on his chin without mustache. Not really a goatee. Different. He pulls on his pirate hat and decides to leave it for now.
It’s getting dark out so he changes into jeans and a black button-down shirt that has little threads of shiny running through it. He hides his computer and locks up the room and starts walking, tipping his pirate hat to the pair of whores that linger at the front of the motel.
“Gringo loco,” he hears one mutter behind him, and that’s okay. He’d rather be crazy than normal.
He walks the mile back to the little gay district, led by the thumping bass of the clubs and the flash of strobe lights as he gets closer. He hits the bar of the first one he gets to, orders “Something big and fruity with lots of vodka!” He feels good; he feels great. He’s gonna drink and party and get fucking laid.
He carries his huge pink drink through the club, flinching when other patrons bump into him or when a hand gropes at his bicep or shoulder or once his ass. The alcohol makes it easier. Knowing that the gay men outnumber any straights that may have come in to cause trouble, that helps too. Not alone, a voice in his head keeps whispering, you’re not alone.
He makes eye-contact, he flirts and smiles. Some guys are drawn to the pirate hat and some are put off by the teeth thing. He finds the happy medium in an older guy, a little soft around the middle and thin around the shoulders, but he lets Jake take him out back, lets Jake go to his knees on the alley-way ground and suck him off and it feels great to prove that he still can, that they haven’t taken this from him.
If he’s not hard that first time, he blames it on the booze and nothing more, because he’s okay. More than okay, he’s fine. Totally fine.
After, he walks back to his room, the ankle-sheath rubbing a sore spot against the side of his calf. He’s not so drunk that he forgets to lock the door and check that his laptop is still in place and then he crashes, sleeping sound through the night.
It’s after noon when he wakes, the room too bright and a headache pounding behind his eyes. He takes some aspirin and goes back to sleep until it’s dark outside. When he gets up for real, he starts a new list:
-vehicle
-dentist
-urologist
-call P
-call T
-direction?
He picks up a truck off of Craigslist for six hundred bucks. It overheats but doesn’t leak oil. Motors aren’t really his thing, but he can read a damn Chilton’s manual, how hard can it be? He spends a week working on it in front of his motel room, puts in a new radiator and water pump. His shoulders sunburn where his tank-top doesn’t cover and the guys at the club seem to appreciate the dark line of dirt under his nails. If they want to run with this fantasy that he’s a blue-collar guy with simple needs, he’s willing to play along with small words and calloused hands.
It takes three dentist visits and a couple of grand to get his teeth fixed up. One for a checkup and evaluation, one to get the posts implanted and one to get the new teeth attached. He feels more like a man when it’s done, his face more important to who he is than the missing testicle.
He trades blow-jobs and hand-jobs in in back-alleys and bathrooms, his fly unzipped just enough to get his dick out. Trick cards pile up beside his computer, a stack of faceless names that he couldn’t put with the nameless faces of the men he’s shared orgasms with.
He’s cruising for dick the night he meets Marco, a slim dark-haired boy standing at the bar. He checks for an over-21 bracelet and finds it, and that’s reassuring because he’s not interested in jail-bait. He makes his way through the crowd and leans in. He’s been working on his lines, struggling to overcome his teenage awkwardness that seems to have followed him into adult life.
He’s got one, and it’s been working so far, so he trots it out, “Hey, so, can I suck your dick?”
The boy chokes on his drink, eyes wide and Jake thumps him on the back.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to catch you on the inhale with that.”
The guy catches a breath and shakes his head, eyes watering but a smile on his lips and that has to count for something.
“No, it’s okay, I just wasn’t expecting…wow.”
Jake shrugs and grins and gives him the “So? Can I?” waggle of his eyebrows.
“I don’t even know your name,” the pretty-boy says and Jake shrugs. It’s more than he usually shares.
“Jake,” he says, and then because he wasn’t raised in a barn, he offers his hand.
“Marco,” the man says, “So ah, not to turn down a blow-job, but you want to go have coffee or something first?”
It’s the first date of Jake’s life, sitting at Cafe Brazil and sipping the Kona. They get around to the blow-job, in Marco’s bed, slow and easy and sweet. Marco is the first man that he lets touch him, and Jake’s almost unbearably grateful that he doesn’t freak out about his uni-ball.
They lay there and talk, after, chatting for hours about nothing at all. Jake smiles sadly when it’s time to go.
“Hey, so, can I see you again?” Marco asks, and Jake gives him his cell phone number.
Marco is awesome, he’s perfect. Jake is a genius; he can figure this boy-friend thing out. He plans and executes perfect-boyfriend displays of affection-flowers to Marco’s work, concert tickets under his door, just-thinking-of-you e-mails and text-messages(he writes an app for it, to keep track of frequency and remind him if he is below the designated threshold).
Four months after the worst day of Jake’s life, he asks Marco to fuck him and it isn’t horrible.
He does everything in his power to make it work, and the one thing he can’t give is the one thing Marco can’t live without.
“Are you closeted?” Marco asks him one night when he tries to leave, “Are you hiding a wife? A girl-friend? Am I just a quick fuck to you?”
There’s nothing Jake can tell him, no way to say “I really like you but don’t trust you.” No way to tell him the very idea makes his skin crawl.
“Be here,” Marco says into Jake’s silence, pulling him close, nuzzling in against his chest. “Be here for me when I go to sleep, when I wake up. It’s all I ask.”
Jake takes his jeans back off and stretches out on Marco’s bed, lies beside him and runs code in his head as Marco’s body goes lax, as his breathing evens out.
The alarm clock goes off six hours later and it’s the most wonderful sound Jake’s ever heard, boredom eating away at his calm. Marco gets up to go to work and Jake goes back to his motel room. He gets two hours sleep before his land-lady bangs on the door to wake him up to fix the door to number seven.
The work is oddly soothing. Painting the cheap wood, installing new molding on the inside of the frame, hanging the hinges. Fixing instead of breaking.
He goes to Marco’s when he’s done. They try to cook dinner together but only succeed in making a mess of the kitchen and an inedible pan full of glop on the stove. Jake takes him out to eat instead, and then they come back to Marco’s place to snuggle on the couch and watch TV.
“I should…” Jake tries to say when the show is over, but Marco grabs him by the hand and leads him to bed. He tries to stay awake, but laying there is the most boring thing ever. If he was on watch, he would get up and walk around, but he can’t. He drowses, startling awake and biting his lip to try to keep himself there. At the first light of dawn he nudges Marco awake, whispers “I’ve gotta go, I need an early start on the day,” and Marco is too sleepy to call him on the lie.
He drives back to the motel, lucky as hell he doesn’t get pulled over for drunk-driving despite being stone-cold sober.
He just means to check his e-mail when he gets back, but there’s a note from Penny, asking his help with a pesky string of encrypted code. He sets a couple programs running on it, and she wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important so he watches until they’re done and he can send her the results.
Marco calls as he’s coming out of the shower and they go out early, dancing and drinking and then back to Marco’s place for a long hard fuck.
Jake is so tired when it’s over, as the endorphins flood his system and his body feels languid, tired. He needs to go, but when he reaches for his pants he gets Marco’s frown, the threat of a pout, and he backs down, planning to stay just long enough for Marco to fall asleep.
He doesn’t remember it happening. One second he’s waiting for his chance to slip away. The next he’s kneeling on the floor beside the bed, Marco under him, blood on the younger man’s face, Jake’s fingers around his throat. He jerks away, scrambles back to the wall in blind panic.
“What the fuck!” Marco screams at him, “What the fuck is wrong with you? My god, you freak!”
Marco holds his nose and Jake wants to see if it’s broken, wants to drive him to a hospital, but the naked fury on his face turns him back.
“Get out!” Marco yells, “Don’t come back, do you understand me? Don’t you ever fucking come back!”
Jake grabs his clothes and gets dressed in the stairwell. Fuck. He knew it wouldn’t be good; he just hadn’t imagined it would be that bad. So close. Jesus, he could have killed Marco.
He stumbles to the truck and drives.
It feels like the middle of the night, but the bars are still open as he pulls through Oak Lawn on his way back to the motel. 1AM-enough time to have a drink before closing time and he’s close enough that he can walk home, pick up the truck in the morning.
The first shot goes down hard around the lump in his throat; he has a second to ease the ache, a third because he’s right on the edge between buzzed and drunk, a fourth because he can feel the comfort of numbness, so tantalizingly close.
He loses track then, bouncing between the dance floor and the bar, throwing himself into both in search of oblivion.
------------
Fear. Darkness. Rough hands shoving him around. The string of the bag tight around his throat. Raw. Sore. Fabric over his face, thick, suffocating.
Jake wakes up to the tiled ceiling, antiseptic smell and muted beeps of a hospital room. He lays there for long moments, trying to separate his memories of the night before from the dream. He remembers last call, sort of, and the lights coming on at closing time. Stumbling out, keys in hand. Struggling with the lock on his truck.
Oh God, he thinks, and bolts upright in bed. His stomach roils and he retches.
“Hey,” a woman’s voice soothes, and a barf-bowl is held out under his face. Her nails are pink with tiny black polka-dots, and she smells like vanilla perfume.
“Did I kill anybody?” he asks between heaves as his stomach tries in vain to expel anything at all. “Please tell me I didn’t kill anybody.”
He looks up at the woman, cute and round and tiny, yellow-blond hair and lipstick that matches her nails (minus the dots). He’s never seen her before, but he can see the concern in her eyes.
“You didn’t kill anybody, J.”
“Penny?” he asks, and she hands him a tissue to blot the spit off of his lips.
Her smile is kind. “Yeah, J.”
“You came? For me? How…what?”
She snorts. “You think you could slip a hospital admission past the office of unmitigated omniscience?”
He swallows and lies back. She settles into the hard plastic chair at his bedside.
“What happened?” he asks, because he doesn’t feel like he’s been in a wreck. He’s achy and his throat is sore as hell, but otherwise no bumps or bruises.
“They found you on the ground by your truck,” she says, and he flinches at the scolding tone. “You had alcohol poisoning, and you’re lucky you didn’t drown on your own vomit.”
“But I didn’t drive,” he says, closing his eyes and thanking god for small miracles.
“Not for lack of trying, J. Look.” She takes a deep breath and Jake braces himself. “You can’t keep doing this, do you understand? You have to eat and sleep and not try to drink yourself to death. You have to stop messing around on DD servers. You have to stop playing chicken with the IT security guys. They caught me, they’ll catch you too, eventually.”
Her hand grips his tight where it rests on the hospital sheets. “You have to do something else, J. Find something that makes you happy instead of burning up your life like this. Don’t let Teresa get a call saying you’re dead or in jail.”
His eyes prickle and he brings a shaky hand up to press against them.
“That’s low,” he croaks, his throat too tight. “Bringing ‘Resa into this.”
“Good,” Penny tells him. “If it hurts, maybe you’ll listen.”
“I’m listening,” he whispers, and he is. He doesn’t want to do that to the people he still loves-Penny and Teresa and Sophie. He doesn’t want to die or go to jail. He holds Penny’s hand and leaves his eyes closed.
“Oh, sweetie,” she murmurs once, but stays at his side until the doctor makes his rounds a little later.
They release him after a couple hours, with a warning to not drink any alcohol at all for the next few days. Penny’s ready to get something to eat. They take a cab back to his hotel so he can check on his stuff. She takes one look at the place and shakes her head.
“This is sad, J. Sad and ugly and I looked at your finances and I know you can do better.”
She waves her hand imperiously and he goes in, gathers his stuff into pillowcases off of the bed (and okay, maybe he can add an on-line shopping addiction to the list of new problems he’s gained since The Incident). He plops the pirate hat on his head and exits the room with a jaunty grin. Penny’s eyes narrow behind the cab’s window, and he knows she’s not buying it for a minute.
He puts his stuff in the cab’s trunk and heads to the office. “Hey, I’m done with the room,” he tells his pain-in-the-ass landlady and she barely looks up from her magazine. He pulls a couple of bills out of his wallet, enough to pay for the hole in the wall when she finds it and the linens he’s unapologetically stolen and leaves them on the counter. He turns to go and her hand snakes out to take the cash.
He gets in the cab and they drive. He’s always thought of himself as independent, but having Penny with him, even for the two days she’s able to stay, it helps. She gets a hotel room and he settles into an executive suite, sort of an up-scale, furnished efficiency apartment type thing. There’s a pool, hot-tub, and work-out room downstairs. A concierge at the front desk at all times, day and night.
His neighbors come through in suit and tie, or in power-skirts with heels to match, and he knows he’ll at least shower on a regular basis in that sort of environment.
They spend the time Penny has in town exploring the city together, one restaurant at a time. She wants to go to the zoo but he talks her down to the aquarium instead and they spend an afternoon in the air-conditioning, watching the giant otter skim around her tank, the manatees floating aimlessly, the tiny sloth eating slices of apples from its long curved claws.
He hugs her goodbye at the airport, and thinks if he’d ever been attracted to women at all that he’d be halfway to in love with her by now.
He honestly expects the restless aching need to burn something down, even if it’s himself, to return as soon as she’s gone, but he keeps it in check. He eases back, slows down. Wakes up in the morning and goes to bed before midnight. Some days he just wants to drink and fuck and fight until there’s nothing left of him. He runs it off instead, or swims laps at the pool, does endless sets on the resistance machines in the gym.
Out of curiosity more than anything, he puts together a resume and shops it around to see what nibbles. He doesn’t have much hope on that front. All of his job skills are self-taught or gained in the military where his exit record stains everything it touches. He gets a couple inquiries for call-center jobs, help-desks, house-call installation and trouble-shooting.
He’ll be damned if he spends the next year of his life asking “Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?” so he starts looking further afield.
When his funds start to run low he gets a lead from Penny, a huge IT security firm that’s releasing its newest system and paying white-hat hackers to show them the flaws in it. He is awake for sixty hours straight on opening day and makes sixty thousand dollars in bounties. They offer him a job on the spot, but he realizes he isn’t ready for life behind a desk.
If he keeps the money on hand he knows he’s gonna blow through it. A real-estate sign in the yard of one of the houses he drives past between Oak Lawn and the executive suites catches his eye and he spiffies up his credit rating and then calls.
It’s a fixer-upper, but he goes through it with the home inspector and it’s all cosmetic stuff. Paint and carpet, some tile, a little plumbing he’ll need help with.
He puts the bare minimum down and moves in, buys some tools and starts working. He goes to sleep sore every night, too tired for dreams, and wakes to a new day and new challenges.
He calls Teresa, one night on the edge of autumn. She cries and curses at him, for disappearing without a word, for letting her worry. She hangs up on him the first time, and the second. He’s not above groveling and knows he deserves every bit of her anger. The third time he calls she lets him talk. About nothing. The house, his truck, how Sophie is doing in pre-school.
He still has a family, and that’s more important to him than anything.
--------
He works on his house and he plays around on-line, just enough to keep in practice. Finding Dale is a bitch since the license plate he’d seen was just for the trailer, not the truck. He has to sift through tons of shipping-company records, collating HR data with routes and times, but he finally tracks him down. Dale and his wife have had a baby, and are trying to buy a house. Jake smiles and repairs some flaws in his credit score, shaves off about thirty percent of their unpaid medical bills. It still doesn’t feel like enough to pay the man back for that one moment of desperately needed kindness, but it’s a start.
He eats out almost every meal, goes to a bar or club at least once every weekend. He flirts but doesn’t go home with anyone. He drinks, but never more than a couple beers. He’s friendly but doesn’t make friends.
The loneliness starts to get to him, and he thinks about dumping the half-finished house, heading north to bug Teresa for a while, but then she gets this new boyfriend she’s crazy about and he’d just be in the way, being her husband and all.
“Take a class,” Penny tells him one night on the phone, and the next day there’s an ad on the radio, the Army Reserves, touting the GI Bill. He busts into the Army’s finances one last time, calculates every cent they should owe him, and has it transfered to his offshore account.
Then he starts trying to come up with the most outrageous, subversive classes he could take on Uncle Sam’s dime. Basket-weaving? Fine art graffiti?
He’s sitting in a salon chair getting his hair cut, the adorable little guy behind him chatting away as he snips Jake’s hair when it hits him. He’s a clever guy, good with his hands. It’s just hair, how hard can it be?
Jake meets the stylist’s eye in the mirror and grins.
“So where’d you learn to do this, anyway?”