Chapter Text
April 19
Outside the little coffee shop, Seth seethed. There he was, Amber’s little fucking bastard, sitting there in the window liked he owned the place. Thoughts of charging the joint and strangling the life out of the fucker entertained themselves briefly in the back of his mind, but he was smart enough not to act on them. The kid had stolen $2500 from him – a good chunk of a week’s wages, wages that had been earmarked for suppliers – and skipped town or wherever the fuck until this moment. Seth thought fleetingly of Amber, the skinny, tweaked-out bitch, who’d been good for a fuck and a quick roof over his head until she skipped out too. He’d had feelers out for her for weeks, with no hits yet.
Seth snorted. The bitch was probably dead. Not that he cared.
No, what mattered now was getting what was his out of that ungrateful little motherfucker sitting in front of him, oblivious to his presence. Seth hadn’t been able to attain the level of prominence in his chosen profession by acting stupid. The kid didn’t have a pot to piss in. And while kicking the ever-loving shit out of him would feel satisfying, it wouldn’t restore his cash or his position among the local distribution hierarchy.
The unkempt man sat, watching. A little reconnaissance was in order.
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November 17
“What’s got you so jumpy, Jensen?” Justin Foley asked, eyeing his adoptive brother skeptically. “You’re acting like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Clay Jensen stared off into the darkened bushes that created a perimeter around the Liberty High School parking lot. “It’s…it’s nothing.”
“Nothing, my ass. You’ve been doing it for a week straight.” Justin paused. “Hey,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. “You’re not…y’know…?” The skinny young man halted, his blue eyes looking expectantly at his friend and now-relative.
“Seeing dead people? Hallucinating violent shooters out of thin air?”
Justin shrugged. “When you start acting all fucking out of it, I think of that night at Bryce’s pool house.” He shivered, partly due to the damp weather. It had rained off and on all that week. “I don’t never wanna see that again.”
“Nice use of the double-negative there, Justin.” Clay smiled, a thin smile.
“Seriously, Clay. What gives?” He pulled open the driver’s side door and got in. The Jensen’s had bought the car for Clay – ironically, the same day their son had smuggled his homeless, heroin-addicted classmate into his bedroom. How Clay had managed to pull that off for a solid week still baffled Justin to no end. Once Justin had become part of the family, they simply shared the Prius, the same as they did the bedroom that had been Clay’s the first sixteen years of his life. Again, that baffled Justin. Mr. Jensen – Matt – had offered to turn his downstairs office into a second bedroom, figuring that the boys wouldn’t want to share living space. Both boys had turned him down flat. For Justin, it was a no-brainer. He liked being around Clay. Plus, someone needed to look after his over-analytical ass. He marveled at Tony’s use of the term “Clay-hole” when the kid got like that, finding it fitting. He worried that was where Clay was headed now.
Clay shook his head, and ducked into the passenger seat. “I dunno. I just…” He shrugged. “I keep getting this feeling…like someone’s been out there, watching me.”
Justin’s eyebrows furrowed. “Watching you? Like, how?”
“Jesus, I don’t know!”
“Like Tyler Down, with his camera, that sort of thing?” Justin fell silent at the mention of the young man, who was currently in a long-term psychiatric residential program. Christ, if he’d known just how fucked up the kid’s life had been, how much Monty and Bryce’s bullshit had taken a toll…
“No.” Clay’s voice broke his reverie. “Like there’s honest-to-God eyes staring at me. It’s creepy as fuck.”
“Well, your parents are waiting for us at home,” Justin said, trying to get Clay’s mind off the odd encounter. “And I know for a fact there’s pizza waiting for us.”
Clay smiled. “They’re your parents too, now.”
The smile crept onto Justin’s face slowly. It was still surreal, being a part of a real, live, functioning family. He still couldn’t believe these people had decided to take a chance on him by making him one of theirs. It was, for him, an unbelievable honor. It also felt like a good kind of debt – the kind that never needed repaying, though you always felt like you should. It was so much different than the debts he was used to, like the once Bryce fucking Walker kept.
He finally understood what Jess was trying to tell him, all those months ago, after his world fell apart from his own fuck-up. The Bryces of the world wanted to own you; they gave in accordance to how much it made them look good or how much it could help themselves in the long run. The Clays, the Tonys, the Zachs and Alexes of the world? They wanted to help because it was the right thing to do. They gave because they felt you deserved it, with no strings attached. Or, in Clay’s case, few strings attached; admittedly, he’d only went looking for him to get ammunition against Bryce and the fucking joke of a school culture he himself had been a willing part of.
Justin had learned his lesson. It had been hard taught, and slow to learn, but he did figure it out. The rewards were so much better than he’d ever imagined. He had friends – real friends, not just “boys” that would only cover for him to save their own asses. He had parents now that cared about him, not just a neglectful mother and the violently abusive boyfriend-of-the-month. Best of all, he had a brother – an unlikely one, to be sure, but one who had his back through thick and thin all the same.
“Yeah,” he said, the smile creeping across his face.
A flash of lights startled him as he put the car into gear. “The fuck…?” he said, turning in his seat.
“The hell? What’s going…”
The back of the car jolted, the thunderous crash as metal and plastic collided deafening. “Jesus, fuck!” Justin swore, mentally checking himself over. No broken bones, but the whiplash was gonna be killer. “You all right, Clay?” he asked, eyeing up his brother.
“Fine, I’m fine,” Clay said, his hands shaking a little. “The hell was that?”
“Some asshole rear-ended us.”
“In a school parking lot, at seven o'clock at night?” It was a fair point. The pair were the last to leave after a thrilling basketball game in which Justin had been the star player. He'd managed to pull a win from out of nowhere, and the crowd had gone nuts.
Justin half-shrugged his shoulders as he slowly got out of the car. “You ever seen a sophomore drive?” He turned towards the other car, an old yellowish-gold sedan. “Hey, watch where you’re going next time, asshole!”
Just then, a black masked figure jumped out of the smoking remnant that was the sedan. Justin tried turning on his heel towards the open door of the Prius, knowing somehow that this would not end well if the guy caught up to him. Footsteps clapped against the cement, and a flash caught Justin’s eye as a second figure yanked open Clay’s door. Unfortunately, Clay had just been about to get out to help Justin before his assailant struck. “Jesus, fuck, let go of me, asshole!” the older boy shouted, fighting as best he could against the man’s iron grip.
It was the gun that stopped both boys cold. Justin’s heart lurched into his stomach as he saw the muzzle resting forcibly onto Clay’s temple. Tires screeched nearby, and Justin watched helplessly as his brother was shoved into another car and spirited off into the night.
“What the fuck?! Where the fuck are you taking him?!” Justin roared, his jolted muscles tightening as he turned to face the masked driver. “What the hell do you want, motherfucker?!”
“I want what’s owed me, dickhead,” the masked figure said, in a voice Justin vaguely remembered. “And you’re gonna pay in full.”
“I don’t owe you anything, asshole.” Justin stood his ground, knowing full well that he probably wouldn’t be able to fight his way out.
“Oh, you owe me. And you’ll pay up. Thought you could start over, everything wiped clean? I don’t think so, bastard.”
Justin was clueless. Sure, there were a few people that hated him; even a couple that would resort to violence against him, perhaps, but Clay?
Okay, bad comparison. Clay’s pissed off more than his share of people too.
That was when the first blow struck.