Chapter Text
Chapter 6
Past
“You must be Diana’s kid – you look just like your mom.”
Keith wasn’t sure who this person was, but the words were familiar.
“Except for your eyes, I’ve never seen somebody with eyes like yours.”
Those words too and Keith never knew what it was about being under the age of eighteen that made people think they could make casual observations about your appearance like that, but he didn’t like it much. It made him feel scrutinized, like he was a bug under a microscope. When he told his mom that she’d just laugh and say, “Maybe you’re not a bug under a microscope, you’re a star above a telescope,” while ruffling his hair and obviously changing the subject. Mom wasn’t too good at feelings.
But one of the hallmarks of his childhood was this exchange – little Keith standing silently by as yet another one of Mom’s weird friends told him he looked just like her (duh, he’d think, of course he did, she was his mom), except for the eyes.
Keith wasn’t sure when he and Shiro started reading the Harry Potter series together but he vividly remembers the look on his older brother’s face when Keith had snapped, with surprising vehemence, “Why doesn’t Harry ever tell them to shut up about how much he looks like his dad? Doesn’t he ever get sick of it?”
Shiro hadn’t had an answer for him, but Keith never could let go of the feeling that the most unrealistic thing about the whole damn series, more improbable than the wizarding world itself, was Harry never just snapping one day under the weight of the eleven-hundreth inane comment about how much he looked like the parents he’d never known.
…
Present
Jack can’t get a read on Keith. His son hasn’t said anything since Jack’s story began and now that he’s run out of words all Jack can do is watch this familiar stranger’s face and wonder what he’s thinking. Which is damned hard to do in a way that doesn’t seem overbearing or creepy.
The fact that Keith hasn’t said anything in the fifteen minutes since Jack’s story ended doesn’t help either.
It’s never silent in a museum, especially not one this large. Museums have a reputation for silence, but so do forests and both are bull. Any place holding living things all living their lives at once is bound to be filled with the kind of soft, surrusrating background noise you take for granted until it’s either gone or the only thing in your ears. So Jack is here, stuck between walls and walls of modern art, listening to the sound of other people’s lives happening in the distance, waiting for a response from the one person who matters in this whole building.
It’s pretty damn nerve-wracking, actually.
Jack hates feeling nervous. He thought he’d outgrown the feeling a long time ago but no, it’s still there, lying dormant, waiting for circumstances to get grim enough for him to need to feel it again.
Finally Keith speaks and no matter what he says Jack can’t help but feel relieved that at least the waiting part is over.
“So what happens now?”
Jack blinks. Fuck. Damn. He doesn’t have an answer. And hell, he could have thought of one in the fifteen painfully awkward not-silent minutes between the end of his sorry tale and Keith speaking. But no, he had to waste that time feeling nervous. What a waste.
“I don’t know,” he says because it feels unfair to lie and he’s never really liked lying anyway. He’s made a career out of untruths but he still doesn’t like the way they sit in his mouth.
“Huh,” Keith says blandly, looking around the gallery. He’s got an expressive face, but that doesn’t make the emotions on it any easier to read. A pause as they stare at rows and rows of brightly colored canvases that aren’t meant to be understood. Looking at Keith, Jack thinks he might begin to finally ‘get’ modern art. It’s a surrender, it’s giving up on anything ever making sense and just embracing the fact that life’s a fucking mess and that’s sometimes okay. He’s pretty sure no art appreciation class would ‘appreciate’ his interpretation but it feels more real than anything the books in the gift shop could have to say.
“You know why those shitty Hallmark movies always end with the estranged parent dying of some incurable disease?” Keith says, apropos of nothing and Jack is trying very hard not to be offended (seeing as he’s the estranged parent in this metaphorical Hallmark movie and all).
“No, haven’t really given it much thought, myself,” he says, an easy drawl you’d have to squint to see the sarcasm in.
Keith side-eyes him, mouth hooking up at the end in an inscrutable smile. “Because,” and Jack can’t tell if his son’s voice is sad or bitter or laughing at a joke that is’t all that funny, “No one knows what happens next in this situation.”
Jack snorts, the kid is right. “And it’s a lot easier to tack dramatic swelling music onto a tragedy.”
Keith laughs, a soft little huff of wry, ironic air, “And it turns out it’s a lot easier to come to terms with difficult relationships when one of the parties is safely dead.” He does sound sad on the end of that one.
“Your mom,” Jack can’t judge, he’s in the same boat and it’s an ugly one.
Keith nods, pinning a Bob Rauschenberg sculpture with a thousand yard stare. The taxidermied animal’s glass eyes gaze placidly back at the two of them and Jack almost wants to laugh at how serene a dead barnyard animal can look when standing on a platform of painted chaos and wearing a tire around its middle.
“Some days I just want her to fucking leave me alone,” Keith tells the taxidermied goat, “It feels like she follows me everywhere, she colors everything I do and I just want it to stop for five fucking minutes so I can be a person for once. Some days the character wearing my name in my brother’s book seems more real than I do,” he blinks and each word hits Jack square in the chest, where his battered, weary, terribly old heart sits and half-heartedly thumps along to this conversation as Keith keeps talking, “I go to my husband’s house for Christmas – “ and despite himself it seems, the corner of Keith’s mouth twitches upward at the mention of his spouse, “and his family is so normal and so…. Settled, I guess. They all know who they are and how they fit into the world and they’ve always known, and if they ever didn’t know they had a whole host of stable, settled people there to help them figure it out. Me, I never had that. Every bit of stability I’ve ever had I’ve had to fight for with my bare hands. And I hate myself for envying them, but I do. They love me and I envy them.”
“But you love them too.”
Keith raises an incredulous eyebrow at him, “Of fucking course.”
And that pulls an unexpected laugh out of Jack’s tired old chest where his battered, weary heart sits, weighed down by words and years. “So there you go. You love them and they love you.”
Keith looks away again, “Yeah, well, I loved Mom and Mom loved me and that wasn’t always enough, you know?”
“Different situations,” Jack says with a shrug, “I’ve never loved anyone like I loved your mom. Probably won’t ever again. I don’t regret a minute of our time together. But her ghost follows me everywhere I go and sometimes I’m tired too.” He reaches out and rests a hand on his son’s shoulder (he feels solid, real, like a person, no matter what he says).
Keith doesn’t say anything in return, but he leans a little bit into the hand, like a child wanting comfort but not knowing how to ask for it.
…
Past
The thing about the night his mother died is that Keith doesn’t remember anything out of the ordinary about it. He doesn’t remember much of the day leading up to the night of the accident either. It’s the kind of shapeless, ordinary day that’s meant to settle in beside weeks and months and years of other shapeless, ordinary days, the building blocks of the past, the support staff behind the hours and minutes sharpfocused with meaning in our memory.
He wishes he remembered something about that day. He wishes he had more concrete details. But all he remembers is another sun-bleached day in the desert. Waking up early to sneak past the heat and set up Mom’s equipment, napping through the hottest part of the day, eating when they got hungry, smearing lotion over sunburns and reading yet another cracked-spine paperback from a library sale.
(He remembers what book he was reading that night; he’s never finished it. In those early days when he’d read anything he could get his hands on, old pulp fiction westerns he could get for twenty-five cents apiece in dusty antique stores were his bread and butter – now he won’t touch the genre.)
He remembers the day she didn’t come home. He remembers waiting and waiting and waiting as the trailer got hotter and hotter in the heavy, wet aftermath of the storm that killed her, and escaping out to the roof with his westerns when the little metal oven got unbearable.
When he tries to remember that day it’s just a smear on his brain an all he can remember clearly is the overbearing scent of air, hot and still.
He called 911 after the second night. One more dead-air day and they found the wreck and her body.
And Keith hates, hates, hates the fact that the only thing he can remember about when his mom died was the taste of stagnant, overheated air trapped in that suffocating trailer and a nondescript, nothing day to mark the last time he saw her.
…
Present
The walk out of the museum and into a bustling afternoon. The sunlight has changed shape since they walked in, turing heavy and gold like fresh honey in their absence. Keith checks his phone and finds a string of irate text messages from Shiro and a bunch of out-of-context memes from Pidge (his neighbor expressing her concern and curiosity the only way the little gremlin knows how). They both bring an unexpected smile to his face. He feels lighter now, the world isn’t trying to crush him like a bug anymore and maybe, just maybe, this strange little afternoon allowed some burdens to be lifted. “Her ghost follows me everywhere and sometimes I’m tired too.” Keith cuts a glance to Jack and sees…just a man. Just a man with both hands in his pockets and both feet on the ground, eyes tracing the tips of skyscrapers. Maybe they’re a family that’s always looking up like that, looking for something beyond the horizon.
Maybe they’re people tied together and rattling against each other like marbles in a box and maybe that’s what family is anyway. People bouncing off of each other, people leaving a mark on you as you leave a mark on them. And sometimes it’s a gentle tap and sometimes it’s a hit that leaves you cracked and dented.
And maybe Keith needs a drink and a reality check before he lets himself get this philosophical.
“Where to now?” Jack breaks into his thoughts.
Keith shrugs, scrolling through Shiro’s irritable texts, “Probably back to town. My brother’s fussing at me. I should probably go remind him I’m twenty eight years old and do what I want.”
Jack snorts and shakes his head, “Lead on, kid.”
And somehow that vote of confidence makes Keith smile just a little bit.
…
Past
Jack’s home wasn’t warm or loving when he was a child. It was loud and harsh and smelled like sticky spilled beer on the floor and felt like crumbs ground into the worm-down fabric of a second-hand couch and sounded like angry shouting and crashes and the staticky tv always on in the background.
And it was temporary.
Jack remembers leaving and he remembers one house after another, strangers and paperwork and group homes and grabby hands. He remembers different schools and different faces and names blending one into another until they became nothing more than syllable soup. He remembers the certainty of always knowing the kid in the next bed over came from somewhere worse than he did and that his story isn’t new or different, just sad. He remembers his social worker’s tired face. He remembers her hand on his shoulder on his eighteenth birthday, the watery blue of her washed-out eyes staring into the stormy purple-black of his as she begged him to stay in school.
He hadn’t listened to her and sometimes he wonders what his life would have been if he had.
…
Present
The drive back is easier. Some of the tension humming between them has eased, but this new peace leaves something empty between them. They’re both being cautious, uncertain if it’s worth it to try to speak and risk bringing all that strain back again.
“What kind of music do you listen to?” Keith breaks the silence with the wry question, recalling an earlier car ride and an earlier awkward ice-breaker and Jack actually laughs.
“All kinds,” he says with an honest shrug, “I’m not picky.”
Keith rolls his eyes, fingers tapping restlessly on the steering wheel, just like his mom, always moving. “Everyone says that. Everyone is a liar.”
Jack snorts, “You know, you’re kind of right.”
Keith nods, “I like kids. They’re honest about what they like and don’t like. They don’t try to lie to make you feel better.”
Jack chuckles, “I wouldn’t know. Never spent much time around kids.”
“Oh I know that,” Keith says and it’s a joke, Jack hadn’t realized they’d gotten to the point where they could comfortably joke about his twenty-eight year absence but apparently they have because Keith’s stab at irony is actually kind of funny. “I don’t spend a ton of time around kids but Lance likes to drag me to community center events and make me volunteer.”
“What a burden, having to give back to the community because someone you love asks you to,” Jack says dryly and Keith laughs.
“Now you get it.”
Silence and then, “Wikipedia says you’re married.”
“I have a Wikipedia?”
“You should probably check it. Your friend said she was going to ‘edit the shit out of that’ so you might need to fix it.”
Keith shakes his head, “I have a Wikipedia page,” he says, a little disbelieving.
“It was pretty boring, if that makes you feel better.”
“Not really, that just means Pidge made it worse.”
“Probably,” Jack says with equanmaity and something else shakes loose in Keith’s chest. He’s laughed more than he expected to today, all things considered.
“But yeah,” he remembers the original comment, “I’m married. His name’s Lance. He’s kind of ridiculous but I love him.”
Jack just nods, staring out at the middle distance, “I feel like I stepped out of a time machine into the future. I meet my kid for the first time and he’s married and almost thirty.”
Keith shrugs, “Probably easier this way. Teenage me would have punched you.”
“That’s fair,” Jack smiles, a little sad, a little distant, but real, “Tell me about Lance. And your friends. Catch the time traveler up.”
And he listens to Keith’s story this time.
…
Keith pulls up outside his father’s motel and puts the car in park. It’s mostly dark now, yellow street light is sneaking through the windows at odd angles to cut strange shapes in shadows across the dashboard. Keith drums his fingers on the steering wheel, still staring at out at the asphalt ahead of them. He clenches and unclenches his jaw, tapping out a restless three-quarter-time beat with his hands. “What did you expect to happen?” he asks suddenly in the stillness, “When you came here. What did you expect to happen?”
Jack shrugs, the seatbelt making a strange zipper sound as his shoulders move under it. “About what happened on the first day. Shouting, door slamming. Maybe a politely worded request asking me to leave and never bother you again.”
“Then why did you come?”
“Because of probability,” Jack says, “Because for every scenario where you didn’t want anything to do with me there was the less likely scenario where you wanted to know me.”
Keith nods. That actually makes sense. That’s how he’d think about it too, if it were him.
“So what happens now?” he repeats the question from the gallery. He’s still not sure of the answer.
Jack shrugs, “I can’t live in a motel forever. But I’ve found there’s always a dive looking to hire a dishwasher and I kind of want enough cash to buy paint again.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I think I need to drive around a bit, find my footing, maybe finish filling up the sketchbook Diana gave me when she kicked me out,” Jack glances over and Keith wonders if it will ever stop feeling strange to look into eyes just like his in someone else’s face. “But I’m gonna stay close, a couple hours away,” a wry smile and that’s familiar too, “In case you’ve ever got a day off and no one to bum around NYC with.”
“No one calls it NYC but tourists,” Keith says because his voice is on autopilot at the implications.
Jack shrugs again, “Guess I have to stick around New England then, become less of a tourist.”
Keith feels an uncertain smile sneaking up on his face as he nods, “Sounds like a good plan.”
“You don’t mind?”
“That this whole conversation feels like a setup for finding your hotel room empty tomorrow morning because our family has a shitty track record when it comes to goodbyes?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah, I don’t mind. Just…if you’re gonna be close by…actually be close by. I don’t have the energy to waste on being disappointed if you bail.”
Jack nods, slow, accepting, “Okay. Message received.”
“Good,” Keith nods, decisive, and unlocks the passenger side door.
Jack smiles wryly, “Is that permission to take the coward’s way out and disappear tomorrow morning?”
“Only if it’s a temporary type of disappearing,” Keith says, “Shiro’s gonna be pissed he didn’t get to meet you.”
“Next time,” Jack says and it sounds like a promise.
“Next time,” Keith agrees, and he tentatively allows himself to believe it, “Maybe you can meet Lance next time too.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Next time.”
“Yeah.”
A moment as Jack climbs out of the car and then Keith, struck by a strange, capricious impulse, grabs the battered paperback from the center console and passes it through the door. “Take it.”
Jack takes the book, thumbing the pages with a calloused thumb. “Thank you,” he says, and he means it.
“You’re welcome. See you soon.”
And Jack nods, an agreement made.
…
Keith returns home, feeling drained but better. Like a fever’s broken and all that’s left is the good kind of empty, the feeling before the rebuilding.
Lance is there with a million questions that Keith makes gentle, one-word responses to until Lance pauses and comes over to stand beside Keith where he sits, exhausted on the couch. A warm, long-fingered hand cards through Keith’s dark, unruly hair and he leans into the touch.
“Tired, babe?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?” All of Lance’s questions boiled down into two words.
“Yeah. I’m good. It’s going to be good.”
“Okay.” And Lance sits on the arm of the sofa and Keith leans back against his chest, allowing fingers to slip soothingly through his tangled hair.
…
Jack opens the book of plays and a piece of old paper covered in decades’ worth of crayon and pencil marks falls out. He picks it up and reads, in crooked child font – ‘My Dad, a List by Keith’.
His lips press together in a smile that’s warm and wry and pained all at once and begins to read. Maybe the next time he visits he can help his son make sense of these little odds and ends of information.
The next time he visits.
His son.
Jack feels better, more…how did Keith describe it? Settled. More settled than he has in a long, long time.
Tomorrow morning, very early, he’ll get in his car, all his possessions in a beat-up duffle and he’ll begin to drive. In a few weeks he’ll turn his car back around and come back here and stay in this fleabag motel and run into his son’s friends at coffee shops and meet his son-in-law whose mere name makes all the sharp lines in Keith’s face unwind all at once, and shake the hand of the almost-stepson who raised his son for him.
But for now he sets the list to one side, tucked safely inside the book, stacked carefully on top of American Gods, and pulls out his old sketchbook and begins to draw a New York City skyline.
…
Past
Diana turned up the radio in their truck, “Hey, listen, it’s our song.”
John Cougar Mellencamp crooned some simple lyrics for a simple song from the speakers.
A little ditty 'bout Jack & Diane
Two American kids growing up in the heart land
Jack he's gonna be a football star
Diane debutante in the back seat of Jacky's car
“Do you think they were happy?” Diana asked out of nowhere. She was staring out window, her long, sun kissed legs stretched out across the dashboard, crossed at the ankle, absolutely stunning like every piece of her.
“Who?” her Jack asked.
“Them,” she gestured at the radio, “Do you think they were happy? Do you think it was enough to just…be like that?”
Saying oh yeah
Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone
Sayin' oh yeah
Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone
John Cougar sang from the radio and Jack didn’t have an answer for her but he was pretty sure the song did. It’s a sad song, he thought, or a happy one, depending on your point of view. Are they content or are they just stuck? Is this the best time of their lives and is that a tragedy or somehow noble?
“I think they’re lucky they live in a song,” he finally said, “they don’t have to find out the end of their story. They can just keep thinking of new ways it could go.”
Diana smiled at him, the whole world in her eyes, “Okay, Jacky,” she said, softly a smile caught in the corners of her lips before she turned and half sang, half shouted the final verse out the window and after a moment he sang-shouted it with her.
Oh yeah, life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin' is gone
Oh yeah say life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin' is gone
Little ditty about Jack and Diane
Two American kids doing the best they can