Chapter Text
The social workers who came to Simon's home to perform a home check were about as graceful as a group of green rookies fumbling drills.
Every room was crudely rifled through. These social workers were definitely not trained with the same policy of patronizing, honeyed words as the woman talked to on the phone last week. He would say he preferred it this way, but if there was one thing he valued the most in the world, it was privacy, and one of the workers in question was currently scavenging through his bedroom closet like it was a car boot sale.
The man in front of him tugged an unlabeled cardboard box from the corner of the closet, dragging it out rudely across the floor.
At the sight of the box, Simon’s jaw clenched.
“Don’t touch that,” Simon warned, stepping forward on a heavy foot. The worker looked up at him unwittingly from his kneeled position on the ground.
He glanced down at the box, then once more up at Simon, offering what he must have thought was a reassuring smile.
“This is all procedural, sir,” He told him, as if this entire ‘procedure’ wasn’t just one great excuse to be obscenely nosy. The man’s gaze fell back onto the box along with his hands, which drummed rudely on the surface. “Soo, what’s in the box that’s got you so cagey, eh?” he asked lightheartedly.
The man, unbothered by Simon’s lack of response, began to hum as he jammed his fingers into the gaps beneath the flaps of the box. He was entirely careless of the way he bent the cardboard as he wrenched it open.
Like Simon said. Nosy. Simon made a conscious decision to leave his question unanswered. The man wanted to know, and the man would find out for himself.
His continued humming faltered when the contents of the box were revealed.
“Eh—“ An aborted sound came from his throat. He yanked his hands away from the box and into the air, holding his palms up like he was getting arrested.
“Ashes,” Simon finally informed helpfully. The glower on his face could’ve burned through the fabric of his black medical mask. The man squirmed under Simon’s glare.
“I—“ He made another failed attempt to speak. “I’m really sorry, mate. I was jus’—“ He was sputtering now.
Simon ignored him.
He stooped down to scoop the box up from in front of the man, beginning to fold the flaps back in without another word.
Before closing it completely, Simon slid his hand against the clear bag that held the pile of ashes. He let his palm flatten against the clear plastic, splaying his thumb over the white informational sticker and tracing his thumb over Johnny’s name.
He shut the box.
The inspection was much less chatty after that. The workers scurried through the rest of the process, keeping their heads down and any chatter, even between the two coworkers, to a minimum. Good. Simon preferred it that way.
At the end of the whole debacle, they determined that his flat met all of the necessary standards. Simon could’ve told them that himself, but he supposed he understood the importance of them confirming that officially.
The presence of firearms initially raised a few concerns, but after determining that they were stored properly and that Simon had all of the required paperwork up to date, it was deemed not to be an issue.
Now, he was just finishing the last of the forms they left for him to fill out.
He tapped the tip of his pen against the paper a few times, blotting a few dots of ink underneath a certain blank on the page.
MINOR’S FULL NAME:
___________________________________
A cramp jolted through his hand. He hesitated, before slowly writing the name out in black ink.
John MacT
His hand paused mid stroke, the pen still planted against the page.
John MacT
John MacConnell
MINOR’S AGE:
________________________________
Simon pinched the bridge of his nose, staving off an incoming headache as the cramp from his hand seemed to crawl upwards through his body.
10
The ink smudged slightly onto the heel of his hand as he pulled it away from the page.
-
When the day finally came to pick ten-year-old John up from the airport, to turn the final scraps of cursed paperwork in and bring the boy home to his flat, Simon was flooded with a profound sense of horror.
It was a difficult thing to suddenly understand how deeply his own world was about to be uprooted. The knowledge that his previously dull off-duty life, in mere hours, was about to be refurbished into the never-would-happen plot of a soap opera had been giving him such striking anxiety that he could hardly keep any food down for an entire day prior to the boy’s arrival in London.
Simon’s own mind sabotaged him incessantly on the ride to the airport.
He drifted to his father. To bruises and broken ribs, and the entire wailing blur of his childhood.
Fatherhood was never something that Simon so much as considered. Johnny may have gently broached the subject, but back then, it was all theoretical. They had no knowledge of the little boy with Johnny’s eyes and namesake living in Scotland without a father.
Simon knew that were he still here, Johnny would never have forgiven him if he turned his back on this boy now.
If there was an afterlife that was real, Simon knew Johnny’s would be at that suburban house somewhere in Scotland. He would be sitting on the porch swing, gazing out at the hills, waiting for Simon to come home.
There was no place for Simon on that Scottish hillside if he walked away from this.
He wanted to hear Johnny's voice again, to hear him say ‘you’d be a good father,’ again, and he wanted to be able to believe him.
You’ll be a good father, he tried to replicate the sound of Johnny’s voice in his own head, but he couldn’t.
Christ, Simon just needed Johnny there. He wanted Johnny so badly that his bones could have shattered within his body.
You’ll be a good father. You will be, he tried repeating the words. It just sounded off.
Simon cried in the parking lot. At this point, he was far too exhausted to be ashamed by it. He just clung to the steering wheel and pressed his face to it, hoping, praying, that this small moment of isolated vulnerability would dispel these feelings from his body before he had to walk into that airport and pretend like everything was fine.
He hoped, desperately, that he wouldn’t end up crying in front of Johnny’s son.
While waiting at the terminal for John’s plane to land, Simon watched a young girl race off of the off ramp of the next plane over and catapult herself into her fathers arms.
It happened so quickly, it yanked Simon out of the foggy daze he’d zoned into while waiting. His body was quick to register the blur of motion as danger, but slow to process the fact that he was in an airport and not an active warzone. His hand shot towards a sidearm that didn’t exist.
Simon paused as he recognized the peaceful, civilian atmosphere that surrounded him.
He was in an airport.
Fluorescent overhead lights shone above his head, pairing with the identical arrays of benches that repeated in the exact same placement for each terminal.
It wasn’t loud. There were no gunshots.
Hushed conversation was dispersed intermittently throughout the space. Most people wore headphones or bovinely stared at their phones. Some slept. The sound of a baby wailing carried out of the door of a nearby bathroom.
He was in an airport.
Simon slowly dropped his hand at his side.
He glanced back over to the place where the original movement had come from, blinking at the father and daughter. The father had looped his arms under his daughter and caught her in his embrace before she could fall to the ground, kissing the top of her head and hugging her close.
Simon stood and stared from across the terminal as they both cried and exchanged loving words and ‘I miss you’s.
Eventually, the man lifted his head from his daughter’s hair, catching Simon’s gaze from across the hall.
The man’s eyes crinkled into a smile. He said nothing, but Simon could sense what the man was communicating through it. It was a smile that lightheartedly said ‘you waiting for yours too, eh?’.
Simon tensed, as if he’d been caught, and froze for a beat before looking away and stuffing his hands in his pockets. He let his shoulders sag slightly and pretended to be interested in the patterns of the rug for the rest of the time he had to wait.
When John’s plane finally touched down, as an unaccompanied minor, the boy was escorted out before the rest of the passengers with a flight attendant.
Simon watched the boy as he slinked off of the plane, dragging his wheeled suitcase lazily behind himself, hand-in-hand with one of the flight attendants who looked as if she was having to do most of the effort to heave him along.
Simon waved the attendant over and handed over the necessary forms and identification to prove that he was John’s guardian.
The first thing he noticed as he looked down at the boy’s scruffy head was his hair.
It was brown—a bit lighter than Johnny’s was, he must’ve gotten the color from his mother, Simon noted—and short but slightly grown out. It was clear it had been washed recently, but despite that, whatever cleaning that was done wasn’t enough to get out the tangled mats of hair still sticking out.
Simon immediately recognized the sign of neglect and mentally logged that he would have to buzz it for him when he got home. It surprised him that someone hadn’t done it already, and Simon was suddenly reminded of the reason why it was so important for him to get the boy out of the foster system in the first place. The boy’s hair was practically a rug at this point, and there was no use even attempting to try and sit down and detangle it.
John had his father’s bushy eyebrows and the same constant pout that wasn’t really a pout, usually, just habitual. Apparently little quirks like that could be genetic.
If his hair was his mother’s, John’s eyes were undoubtedly his fathers. Two oceans held within two little downturned half-ovals.
Simon tried to ignore how it hurt to look at the boy, struggling to make eye contact with him when the flight attendant nudged John forward with an awkward, forced smile. She didn’t seem to understand exactly what was going on.
“Go on with your da’, laddie,” the attendant coaxed, patting his back. John squinted at the woman and hobbled forward with his suitcase and a furrowed brow.
“isnae my da’,” John murmured grumpily under his breath with a familiar Glaswegian accent that was a little thicker than what Simon had ever heard from Johnny. The military tended to have their own dialect, and it must’ve softened Johnny’s accent over the years.
The woman raised a brow at the boy’s comment, but Simon thanked the woman quickly, dismissing her before he had to explain anything about this circus.
Simon watched John fall into step beside him, and any words that he’d previously prepared for this moment suddenly failed him.
Simon opened his mouth, and hesitated. He raised his hand, but it froze midair, hanging above the boy. He didn’t even know what he’d intended to do with it—a head pat? A fatherly back clap? He wasn’t fooling anyone.
He lowered his hand and stuffed it back into his hoodie pocket, hoping that John hadn’t noticed.
“Let’s get you home, John.” There was a weakness in Simon’s voice that he didn’t recognize, and he mentally cursed himself for being so damn awkward.
Later, he would learn the difference between tenderness and weakness, but for now, they were one and the same to him.
The boy’s eyes flicked up. The pout on his face was more prominent now.
“It’s Johnny,” he corrected meekly. John glanced back down at his shoes and kicked the ground lightly.
Simon felt his jaw clench at the correction. All of a sudden, his heart was a dove in his ribcage, frantically flailing to escape.
He tried to mouth the name, as if to test if he could do it.
It felt like ripping teeth.
Simon gently took the boy’s suitcase and started to walk with him towards the parking lot, where his car was waiting for them.
He pretended not to hear the correction.
-
The car ride home from the airport was about as painfully awkward as Simon had anticipated.
It was dusk, and the city lights of London were just starting to light up. The windows of flats, bars, and the shops in the business districts began to glow with a pale yellow color as the sun slowly retreated behind the earth.
Street lamps blinked on, shining cone-shaped beams of light onto the sidewalks and streets.
Traffic was rough on the way home, which was strange because it was after 2000, but Simon assumed that it was because it was a Saturday. That and the fact that Simon was generally pretty unaccustomed with the traffic patterns of the city because he barely drove when he was off deployment in the first place.
He just kept his beat down dark gray 2016 Corolla for assurance for certain errands and in case of emergencies.
Being suddenly tasked with the responsibility and guardianship of a ten-year-old with so little heads-up did not technically qualify as an emergency, but to Simon it certainly felt like one. And now, as a result of that entire situation, having a car was definitely necessary.
The car halted at an intersection. The traffic signal swept a layer of red light over the interior of the vehicle.
Simon used the rear-view mirror to glance at John in the back seat.
He was slumped in the far corner of the seat with his hands and chin resting on the small ledge of the door, his left cheek smushing up against the window as he stared out of it. The right side of his face was painted by the red light.
Simon cleared his throat.
“…So, John,” he started, but paused momentarily before he continued, as he realized that he had started to speak before he even knew what he was actually trying to say.
The boy’s head lifted from the window and turned to glance at him. Greyish-blue eyes sliced through the red light.
Ocean. Thunder.
Simon snapped his eyes away from the mirror and back onto the road in front of him, just in time for the light to turn green. His grip on the steering wheel grew tighter as he lifted his foot from the brake.
“…how was the flight from Scotland?” Simon asked, deciding that that’d be an appropriate, entry-level starter for a conversation.
John’s little mouth shifted to one side of his face, part frown, part deliberation.
“It wasnae bad,” he answered with a small voice. “An’ it’s no’ John, I dinnae like to be called John,” the boy insisted for the second time. “It's Johnny.”
Simon distantly wondered how many more times he would be able to get away with pretending not to hear him or just ‘forgetting’.
He brushed the thought aside for now.
“Tha’ sounds alright,” he told him, moving past the boy's correction. He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, trailing off again as he thought of anything else to say. “…Flight attendants were nice to you?”
“Aye.” John nodded his head slightly before he turned his head back towards the window, hunching up again.
“…Good.”
The conversation went stale once more, and for a while, there was only the muffled sound of the surrounding city ambience through the doors.
Every few minutes they would reach another red light. The humming motor would pause, leaving the two of them to drown in the awkward silence that festered beneath the shallow comfort of white noise.
Every time, as he waited for the signal to turn green again, Simon would subconsciously hold his breath.
The red light flickered back to green and the silence was finally overtaken by the rushing of wind against the windows once more as the car started to move.
“Are you my da’s brother?" John suddenly asked. When Simon glanced in the rear-view mirror again, he could see that he had lifted his head again to look at him.
Simon’s nose wrinkled in disgust.
“God, no,” he responded bluntly, not feeling the need to soften his words for the kid.
“Well who are ye then?” John asked, tilting his head at Simon.
“Bloody hell, did they not tell you a single thing about where you’re off to?" Simon grumbled, sighing softly through his nose. He felt a little bad for the kid.
John’s brows furrowed.
“Well you’renae much more helpful than them are ye? You arenae tellin’ me nocht!” Little Johnny suddenly snapped, his accent flaring up with his anger. “I asked ye who ye are, ye roaster! Jus’ tell me!”
Simon’s eyes widened at John’s sudden burst of personality. If he wasn’t so drained from the events of the day, he might’ve smiled, but he still couldn’t help but breathe out a small huff of humor as he watched the kid angrily cross his small arms over his chest.
There was his Johnny.
“You can call me Simon,” he said.
John’s mouth twisted to one side of his face, and Simon could tell he wasn’t fully satisfied with just a name.
“I was…” he trailed off, trying to offer a bit more information for John, but his throat dried up as he was suddenly forced to put a label on whatever the fuck he and Johnny ever were so casually. “I was a friend of your dad’s,” he finally supplied.
The statement made his stomach churn as it came out of his mouth.
“A close one,” he added, involuntarily, as if he felt the need to prove something. It wasn’t even like the kid would care that much.
Simon felt his hands cramp around the wheel. He felt dizzy, and for a moment, he was worried he may have to pull over, but John’s voice sounded out again and cut through his haze.
“Did ye fight together, in the wars?” John asked with an intonation that felt like lead in Simon’s stomach.
It was too horribly familiar.
He’d heard the same bright tone in the hopeful voices of secondary school students at military recruitment visits, boys too young to recognize that the smell of blood and gunpowder was not something to venerate.
He’d recognized it in old polaroids of Johnny from secondary school, all reckless, toothy grins and glimmering eyes.
Simon didn’t dare look back up at the mirror, for the risk of catching those eyes again. He knew he would be met with that same face, younger than even Johnny was then.
“Yeah. We served together,” he told him, and John was quiet for a few seconds.
“Maw always said he died when I was two.” The tone he used made it clear that he knew that wasn’t the case.
Simon paused. He still had a very limited understanding about the circumstances of John’s past household. He knew drugs and neglect were involved, but he didn’t know any specifics, and he didn’t want to pry.
“Be careful who you trust, John.” He found the strength to glance at the boy through the mirror. “People you know can hurt you the most.”
John looked away from Simon’s eyes in the mirror and back to the windows with a slight pout.
“I ken they do,” he said quietly. “All grown-ups lie. One way or anither." Resentment simmered beneath the boy’s words.
“Hmm,” Simon hummed in agreement, “That they do.”
Simon looked away from the rear-view mirror again.
“Like you?” John asked.
Simon short circuited at the question, staring at the road.
He knew that John obviously did not know about the history between Simon and his father, (ten-year-olds weren’t exactly jumping to assume those kinds of things) but his heart jumped in his chest at the unintentional implication the question had.
Simon dragged his thumb along the textured leather of the steering wheel slowly, letting the cool surface soothe him as he deliberated on a response.
“Only when it’s necessary,” he answered, knowing the answer wouldn’t be satisfying.
“Hmph.”
John only grumbled in response, and the rest of the drive was silent.