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Jack leaves Indiana the week before he turns eighteen.
His parents go to visit a family friend for the weekend, leaving him in charge of his sister. Beth walks in on him as he’s packing, and says: “Wish I could say I was surprised.”
Jack adds another pair of socks.
“So where are you headed?” She leans against the doorframe, nonchalant, but her voice is a touch too light.
“Army.” He rummages through a drawer, considers if there’s any point in bringing a hairbrush. “Out of state.”
“Smart.” Beth scuffs the heel of her shoe on the threshold of his room. “Won’t find you.”
“You can come,” Jack offers, fruitlessly. He puts the hairbrush back in the drawer.
She just smiles at him, bitter around the edges. “Did you tell Vince?”
“Couple days ago.” Jack runs his hands along the edge of the duffle bag. “I was going to tell you.”
“Were you?” Beth folds her arms. There’s a vicious red welt Jack knows extends all the way down her forearm, half hidden by her jacket. “Before or after you stole the truck?”
“Vincent is giving me a lift.” Pathetically small. “To the city. I’ve got a plane.”
Beth hums. “Suppose he hid the ticket for you?”
“Mhm.” He zips up the bag, swings it around his shoulder. It’s not even halfway full. “I better get going.”
“Ask him if he’ll set me up with his sister,” she jokes. “I’d like someone to help me out too.”
“I’m serious,” he says again. Grips the strap of the bag so tightly it hurts. “You can come with me. They let you do that.”
“No, they don’t.” She tilts her head. “I’ll be okay, Jack. I can always go stay with Gina. Her parents don’t mind.”
Jack bites the inside of his lip, still guilty. “I’ll come back for you in a couple years, then.”
“Sure.” Beth leans off the doorframe, gestures like she’s rolling out the red carpet. “C’mon, then. No need to linger here. Nothing much to stick around for.”
“Beth…” He stays still, still with a death grip on the bag. “I don’t want you to think I’m leaving you with them. I just…”
“I know.” Her smile thins. “He won’t come near me. Mom won’t let him, you know that.”
It’s a reassurance and a cruelty at the same time. He nods, unable to find any words that sound right, and leaves his room. The door shuts - thud-thunk - behind him, and the floorboard three steps down from his room whines for the last time Jack will hear.
Outside, Vincent is already waiting, nervously drumming on the wheel of his mother’s car. Jack knows she’s going to be furious with him, and Vincent is still here, all the same. It’s not fair; not fair that he’s doing this despite Jack breaking up with him, and leaving, not fair that he’s leaving Beth behind because he’s too much of a coward to stay, and not fair that his father -
Beth puts one hand on his shoulder and he practically jumps out of his skin. She laughs, then shoves him forward, and he stumbles down the steps. The middle one creaks like it always has, loud enough to hear through his window.
Vincent nods at him, and smiles, waving to Beth as she stands on the porch. Jack turns - the house blocks the evening sun, and Beth is shrouded in shadow, the porch light not yet switched on. He thinks about how he may never see that porch again, and gets an odd surge of guilty delight.
“You better write,” she says, and Jack politely ignores how her voice cracks at the end.
“I will,” he responds, sliding into the passenger seat.
He doesn’t.
--
Jack returns to Indiana once.
He gets the call while he is, luckily, in the country. He’s asleep in Chicago one moment, then methodically booking a flight to Bloomington at two in the morning the next.
“Jack?” Gabriel mumbles, still half asleep. He pulls most of the quilt towards him as he rolls over, cracking open an eye. “You okay?”
Jack says nothing, just books the plane and saves the ticket, then puts his phone down on the nightstand. The carpet of the hotel room feels like a yawning abyss, and he pulls his legs back up onto the bed, clutching his ankles.
“Jack,” Gabriel says again, and Jack’s scrambled thoughts are cut through by a warm calm. “You’re shaking. What happened?”
Jack can’t comprehend speech, so instead he lets Gabriel share the singular thought: Beth is dead.
Gabriel pulls him back into a hug, and then he’s crying until he’s retching and aching because he never wrote.
Gabriel insists on coming with him to Indiana, so they book another meaningless hotel and Gabriel argues with someone important on the phone for a solid hour. Jack in turn insists he goes to the funeral alone, and Gabriel doesn’t argue, just sits sharing his pain, lets him know in words and thought that he understands.
Jack knows he does, but some part of him still blindly thrashes and says you can’t, you can’t. You loved your family. Gabriel hears it and pretends he doesn’t. Jack will apologize when he remembers how to feel anything other than grief. It had been the same when Los Angeles was destroyed; Gabriel stricken with guilt that he had let down people who had done nothing but love him, and Jack couldn’t understand that, could he?
Jack brushes temporary brown dye through his hair because he is technically a celebrity; Gabriel helps him style it just enough that when he looks in the mirror he barely recognizes himself, dark haired and unshaven and eyes red. Gabriel kisses him goodbye and makes him promise to be back before midnight, knowing that it won’t just be a simple in and out of the church. Nothing ever was, here.
Jack was raised Methodist. He assumes Beth either stuck with it or never wrote a will; she was twenty-five. The cities had been declared safe, more or less. It’s a closed casket service. He wonders who organized the funeral, because he was never contacted until a family friend had notified the undertaker that she did, in fact, have a brother. The priest drones about how sad it was that the Morrison family should suffer such an end, another tragic casualty of the Crisis.
There are a grand total of twenty people at the funeral, and Jack assumes most of those missing are dead. He sits himself near the back and eyes the door, ready to hurry out in case he’s spotted. He can’t make out anyone near the front, but at the back he sees one of his father’s co-workers and nearly has a panic attack until he reasons how ludicrous that would be. So he spends the rest of the service half-dissociating, never taking his eyes off the pale wood coffin at the altar.
People begin to shuffle out, and he dips his head to avoid eye contact, and almost everyone files out of the church without paying him mind. He barely registers one lingering figure until they sit down on the pew next to him, and he thinks, God, this is it, this is where they find me.
“Jack,” Vincent says.
Jack just stares at him.
“Everyone else is gone,” he continues, with the gentleness reserved for those incapacitated by loss. “Why don’t we get some coffee, yeah?”
Jack nods, and they leave, and he misses the burial because he isn’t sure he can stand it.
Vincent doesn’t make idle chatter, keeping a respectful silence while they enter some chain coffee store and he orders for them both. Jack finds himself staring at a caramel latte, his old favourite.
“It’s good to see you,” he says eventually, lamely, as Vincent sips at whatever he’s drinking.
“I’d say the same,” Vincent half-smiles, “But I do see your face every day. The hair’s a good touch.”
He subconsciously reaches up to touch it. “Yeah, I did my best on a day’s notice and no sleep.”
“It looks pretty natural.” Vincent eyes him for a moment. “I think blonde suits you better, though. And don’t go any darker than that.”
“Thanks for the fashion advice.” Jack takes a swig of the coffee, and it burns his tongue. Absurdly normal. “How have you been?”
“Oh.” He pauses, looks a little skittish. “Well, okay, given the circumstances. Pretty glad Dad built that nuclear bunker, because it allowed us to stay pretty much safe for most of the Crisis. Hopefully now that’s over with, I can actually go to college, you know?” Vincent raises an eyebrow. “I suppose I have you to thank for all that.”
“Not really,” Jack says, automatically; he had received far too many undeserved thanks in the past few years. “It could have been literally anyone. I was picked up randomly from my squad and got pretty damn lucky.”
Vincent snorts, dismissive. “Still. It was you in the end, right? Well, not just you. You can thank your friends for me too.”
Jack thinks of how Ana or Gabriel would respond to that and feels almost hysterical. “Sure.”
“And,” Vincent glances down at Jack’s hands, awkwardly resting on the table. “Congratulations, as well. I saw that interview on the T.V. Gabriel, right?”
Jack remembers he’s actually wearing his wedding ring instead of having it around his neck, because there’s no blood or dirt to get stuck in it at a funeral. “Yeah. He, um, wasn’t very happy about that afterwards.”
There had been an interview after the Behemoth had been destroyed where despite Jack’s careful guidance, the host had consistently stressed how close friends he and Gabriel must have been in order to pilot together. Eventually Jack had snapped and said something vaguely obscene, and the interview had ended and Gabriel had tried to be as embarrassed as possible while also not losing himself to laughter. Their relationship had, subsequently, been the subject of several tabloid headlines that Jack wishes he could forget.
He’s smiling a little, though, and Vincent looks relieved enough that Jack decides there’s no better time to ruin it.
“I, um. Did you keep in touch with her?”
Vincent politely laces his fingers together, expression neutralizing. The cuff of his dress shirt sticks to the table, which he doesn’t notice. “Not really. After she graduated, she left the state for a while, but ended up back here when… when John died. I don’t know where she went in the middle of a war, but she seemed to miss it.”
“Right.” Jack gets the overwhelming sense he’s being invasive, somehow. He wraps his hands around his mug. “And when my mother was killed?”
“She inherited the farm.” Vincent takes another sip of coffee, with the arm with the cuff that isn’t stuck to the table. Jack is pretty sure it’s jam. “She didn’t want it, but nobody else was going to buy a farm during the Crisis, so she stayed there. I really didn’t see or hear much of her. She kept to herself.”
Jack stares at his latte.
“...She did ask about you a lot,” Vincent adds. Some of the bubbles in the latte foam burst. “She said if I ever saw you to… say she misses you, and she loves you.”
It’s a lie. Jack almost appreciates the effort. “What else did she say?”
Vincent looks at him for a long time, mouth drawn into a line. “Jack, I don’t think-”
“Please.” The mug starts to burn his hands.
Vincent looks torn, but in the end he relents, because he had always been honest to a fault. “Beth was angry you never wrote. I’m sure you know that. When she saw you on the news, she… understood, but that anger never really went away, I don’t think.”
Jack nods. Another cluster of foam bubbles pop out of existence.
“I really didn’t keep up with her that much. I think her seeing me hurt a bit, I always got the feeling she assumed I talked to you. Which of course I didn’t,” and his voice is just a touch sad, because Beth wasn’t the only one he promised he’d stay in contact with. “But there was no way I could convince her of that without making a bunch of unfair assumptions. At John’s funeral, she gave a speech about how family had always been important to her, and repeated it verbatim at Catherine’s.”
Jack almost laughs. “I’m surprised she gave a speech at all.”
“She was pretty good at keeping up appearances,” and suddenly Vincent’s use of the past tense feels more real. Jack’s mild humour fades, and he clutches the mug tighter. “I, um, don’t know what’s happening to the farm. I think it goes to the state, unless Beth left it to you, but I don’t think she’d do that.”
“Probably not.” Jack watches as Vincent lifts his stuck cuff from the table; it is, indeed, jam.
“Do you want to visit?” He asks. “No pressure, but it might help.”
Jack considers it; thinks about Beth standing on the porch, shadowed by the house, consuming her and never letting her go. “No.”
“Alright.” Vincent tries a smile. “Well. Do me a favour and give me some way to contact you in the future?”
Jack obligingly rattles off his phone number, and Vincent scrabbles to input it. The jam on his shirt sticks it to the inside of his suit sleeve.
They finish their respective drinks in silence, Vincent kind enough not to prod and Jack too guilty to ask anything else. For nearly a decade he had cut himself off from thinking about his life here, focused only on war and saving the world instead. Guilt sidles up his throat and he once again has to convince himself of the absurdity of being recognized while having a public panic attack.
Vincent watches him for a minute before intervening. “If you need to leave, we can leave. I’ll drop you anywhere in the city, Jack, it’s no problem.”
It’s pity, Jack thinks suddenly. The same thing that had motivated him to drive Jack to the airport and take the fall for borrowing his mother’s car. Vincent knows nothing about him anymore aside from what’s on the television and the few snipped stories he had shared with him about his father, clipped and sanitized for public domain. And his dead sister, buried in the same plot as his parents that had cut him out of their life the moment they realized he’d escaped it.
He shakes his head. “My hotel isn’t far. I’d appreciate the walk. Clear my head a bit.”
Vincent doesn’t believe him, smile thinning, but he accepts it. “Alright. If you ever… have questions, or need anything…”
The implication is supposed to be: just ask. Jack knows he means: I’m only offering because it’s kind.
Vincent says goodbye outside the café with the same detached kindness he had at the airport ten years ago, but Jack understands it better now.
He walks around Bloomington for hours. There’s not many shops open yet, mostly restaurants and a few supermarkets, sparsely stocked. The rest of the city is shuttered and dead, and there are far fewer people milling in the streets than he remembers.
His body aches; he doesn’t remember when he last ate, and it feels like his grief overrides his enhancements. He thinks about how if he had come back for Beth she would still be alive, safe, somehow. It’s an impossible thought but he holds onto it anyway, and then his phone is ringing because it’s midnight and he’s alone cold in a back alley with no recollection of how he got there.
“It’s okay,” Gabriel says when Jack can only sob harshly into the phone. “It’s okay. I’ll come find you.”
Gabriel tracks his phone and finds him within ten minutes, only half a mile from their hotel. They sit out in the cold night on the concrete until Jack collects himself enough to walk, numbly, back to the room. Gabriel mumbles soothing nonsense under his breath and doesn’t ask where he’s been, just hauls him into bed and wraps him in the stiff linen sheets until he’s above freezing. In the morning, Jack will mechanically eat enough food for three people and spend the flight back to Chicago trying not to throw up, and he will never go back to Indiana.
--
Twenty years pass. Jack Morrison dies in August, and Soldier 76 visits Indiana in February.
The farm has been reappropriated by the state, but they have ignored the house, which stands shabby but firm in the twilight. It feels like some kind of hamfisted metaphor, or a sign, or something, but he doesn’t really care. He’s brought two large canisters of gasoline, and a box of matches. Conspicuous, but efficient.
Soldier 76 knows the middle porch step creaks loudly, and avoids it as he ascends, and the door is broken and comes off the hinges because he pulls too hard. He stares at it for a moment, then leans it against the wall and is swallowed by the house.
There’s still furniture inside, sparse and rotting but intact. He checks the drawers out of morbid curiosity, but there’s nothing left in most of them, all trinkets stolen or donated at some point. There’s some cutlery and some dishes, maybe a couple pieces of stationery, nothing to identify who once lived here. He knows he has to go up the stairs to properly coat the building, but he also knows that the room closest to the top has a floorboard three footsteps away that whines.
He exits the house, and picks up one of the canisters. It takes him a while to sum up the will to enter again, and he stops at the top of stairs and considers for a long time.
He eventually walks forward. The floorboard whines. His room is completely empty; no bed, no drawers. Scratches in the concrete walls that have softened with age. Someone was ripped from here hundreds of times, sometimes fighting and sometimes relenting. The barn, visible from the window, has long since been torn down.
He douses most of the petrol in this room alone, trailing the rest down the halls and he doesn’t dare to enter any of the other rooms. His - Jack’s sister’s door is closed, as is his parents’. Soldier 76 sloshes liquid over the handles methodically and when he returns down the stairs, the whine of the floorboard is lost in the sound of his laboured breath.
Hallway, kitchen, living room, office; one after the other. He takes a break only to fetch the second canister, discarding the first in the fireplace. His entire body stinks of gasoline and he wonders as he works if he will catch flame when he lights a match, and knows he doesn’t care. There are a few picture frames still hanging on the walls, faded photos of scenery with no human in sight. He splashes the petrol directly at them and they spit it back in his face.
The second canister empties, and the fumes are almost overwhelmingly nauseating. He throws it at the bay windows in the living room where Jack’s mother would ignore what his father was doing to him in the barn and watch the evening news. The glass shatters and the noise startles him despite his action, and he reels backwards and out the front door.
His first attempt to light a match is thwarted by the shake of his hands. He ends up peeling off the thick leather gloves and striking them bare, and some cruel miracle prevents his body alighting. He throws it in, strikes another, throws it, again and again. A hundred matches join the pyre and the smoke is acrid, thick and suffocating. Some memory dances at the edge of his thoughts; an explosion, fuel leaking on the ocean surface, white hot pain across his face - and he ignores it, because those memories are for the man who died in the Mediterranean Sea.
The blaze lights up the darkness and burns long into the night, and by the time it’s reported the sun is touching the edges of the sky, illuminating the skeleton of the porch. The fire department arrive swifter than any emergency services had in the past - two Omnics with a heat resistant chassis enter the building to search for survivors only to miss the ghosts.
Soldier 76 watches from a safe distance, where the farmland meets the edge of a small wood, where Jack Morrison would hide as a child, as a teenager, where he intended to die. The fire is extinguished, the house is destroyed, and ash sticks to his skin. The man inhabiting his body leaves Indiana and never returns.