Chapter Text
1
Travis was surprised when he’d woken up that morning on his own instead of with the alarm. Highly unusual for him, because most of the time it seemed as if his body was perfectly content to sleep in until noon every day if he didn’t have an alarm to keep himself on track. He rolled over onto his side, facing the rest of the room and sighed. He wasn’t really tired anymore, but he still didn’t want to get up just yet because then he’d have to get ready to deal with his father at the church.
He cracked open his eyes, and found that it was a lot easier to see around the messy bedroom than it normally would’ve been at the hour he wakes up, on account of the light streaming in through the narrow basement windows.
He shot up in the bed, causing the old thing to shake and squeak rather dramatically, and his head whipped around to find the alarm clock sitting on top of the dresser behind him. To his dread, it read 10:39 am.
‘Screwed’. That was the word that rose to the top of his mind and halted every other thought in its tracks.
The pit in his stomach quickly became alight with rage, however, when he realized that he did, in fact, set that alarm last night, meaning that there was only one person who could have changed it. Someone who wasn’t currently in bed with him.
He clenched his jaw as he stepped out of the bed, and he grimaced as the cool basement air hit his naked lower half, revealing some of the damp and sticky sensation between his legs. They hadn’t cleaned themselves up before going to bed the previous night. Under other circumstances, Travis would’ve found it abhorrently disgusting, but the one good thing about sleeping with the other man is that he was physically incapable of cumming inside.
Once he threw on yesterday’s clothes, pulled from the pile they’d left them in on the ground, he whipped open the bedroom door, nearly bumping into Lisa as he stormed out, surprising her as she walked by.
“Ah-” He stumbled over himself, his anger dissipating as he saw her. It may have been her son that he was so angry with, but unlike him, Lisa was careful, considerate, and understanding. How it was possible that the two of them were related remained a mystery to Travis.
“Excuse me, Ms. Johnson, I have to go kill your son.” Said Travis, holding a hand up in a bland calmness, the kind that came just before all the shouting.
Lisa raised a brow in amusement. “Be my guest, my break is over.” She stepped aside, making her way to the front door to get back to work. Travis turned his head to see Larry in the kitchen. He was stirring at something on the stove, but the way his shoulders tensed told Travis that he was merely attempting to ignore the interaction behind him. He knew full well what was going on.
‘Screwed’ was the word.
“Larry Johnson.” Travis hissed as he stomped over.
“Good morning, beautiful.” Larry turned around slowly, holding a hot bowl of grits with a strained smile.
“You turned my fucking alarm off again.” Travis leaned in.
“IIIIIII also made you breakfast.” Larry held the bowl up nervously, but Travis pushed it back down so he could lean in further.
“Do you have any idea how much that fucks me over?” Travis growled through clenched teeth.
“Well, I figured I’d just let you sleep in, y’know, ‘cuz six hours of sleep is better than two.” Larry shrugged innocently, but Travis wasn’t fooled.
“It’s Sunday, you asshole!” Travis threw an arm in the air as he yelled.
“So I made your favorite.” Larry held the bowl up again, flashing another wide, strained smile.
Travis glared at him for a few more seconds before ripping the bowl from his hands. “Give me that.” He spat. A few minutes later, Larry quietly sat a mug of black coffee next to him, before pulling out a chair and setting down his own breakfast: A Redbull and a pack of Winstons. His mother hated it when he smoked in the apartment, but Larry was a born and bred shit, so he only did it when she wasn’t there.
They didn’t speak as Larry lit up and Travis angrily scarfed down his food in a tense silence.
After a bit, Larry sighed and stubbed his cigarette out on the ash tray on the table, the open basement window at the top of the wall not doing very much to suck the smoke out of the room. “It’s not like he can-”
“Zip it!” Travis snapped.
Larry raised his brows and mouthed a quiet ‘okay’ before pulling out another cigarette.
Travis finished the last of his bowl and set it aside before leaning back in his chair and taking a sip of his coffee. “I can’t keep coming here on Sundays, because I can’t trust you not to be a dickhead and get me in trouble.” He glared at Larry.
Maybe somewhere, deep down, this really was about Larry wanting him to get enough sleep at night, caring for Travis in his own misguided ways, but at this point, Travis would prefer it if he didn’t care. Larry was great at fixing busted pipes and broken garbage disposals, but every time he tried to help Travis, it only ever seemed to get him in trouble, and that’s what he just didn’t seem to understand.
“You are twenty-one years old, what the fuck is he gonna do to you?” Larry snapped back.
“Well first of all, he’ll kick me out and disown me, at best. Let’s start with that-”
“Who gives a fuck if that dickhead disowns you, nobody even likes him except all the old homophobic fucks that hang out with him!” Larry waved his hand in the air, exasperated. He had a point, but at the same time, Travis knew he had no idea what he was talking about. He knew absolutely nothing about what kind of person Kenneth was.
“-At worst, monastery. Conversion therapy. He’ll throw me to the fucking mormons and make me a missionary, you don’t have any idea what he’s capable of!” Travis jabbed his index finger into the tabletop to punctuate his point. Kenneth could—would—do a whole hell of a lot more than that, murder was only the start, but he left that part out.
“And he can’t do any of that shit without you being on board with it, because you are a fucking adult. The most he has over you is housing, which is easily fixed by, oh, I don’t know, moving out!? I know you have the money for it, you’re just a fucking coward.” Larry pointed an accusatory finger at him before crossing his arms, moving to sit back down, but Travis’s blood was boiling, now.
The blond jumped out of his seat at the table and grabbed Larry by the collar of his shirt. “You take that back right now. I am not a coward.”
Larry scoffed. “Then why don’t you move out? Why don’t you stand up to him? Why don’t you do literally anything instead of just sitting on your ass and complaining about your fucking dad all day?”
Travis shoved Larry back into his chair. “You don’t fucking understand! I can’t just leave! It’s not that fucking easy!”
“No, I do understand, Travis! I understand that you have never had to make a difficult choice in your entire life. You’ve had all your choices made for you this whole time, and now you’re so dependent on your father for literally everything that you’d rather stay with him and be miserable than actually live for yourself.” Larry slammed his palms on the table as he yelled, and he was shortly met with a fist at his cheekbone in response.
He sat in his chair, head tilted to the side as he caught his bearings. He touched his cheek to test for blood and licked his lip before turning back to Travis, seeing the tight fist clenched by his side.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Larry said bitterly. “Just like your fuckin’ dad does it.”
The room exploded as Travis pulled Larry up and out of his chair by the collar of his shirt, knocking his seat to the ground before tackling him onto the linoleum, the kitchen table sliding a few feet across the floor in the process. He grabbed Larry by the hair, pulling his head back to glare at him as he hissed, “Don’t you ever say that shit to me again.”
“This is pretty kinky, even for you.” Larry smirked from underneath him. Travis pulled back, his face turning beet-red.
“What the hell is wrong with you!?” Yelled Travis, but in the distraction of his shock, Larry had grabbed his wrists, throwing all his weight into his hips to flip the two of them over and pin Travis to the ground.
“You’re so fuckin’ easy.” Larry grinned. He had Travis’s wrists pinned to his shoulder, and putting all of his weight on the other man, Travis wasn’t going anywhere. Larry was much stronger than him, and they both knew it.
“Let me go.” Travis growled through clenched teeth.
“Move out.”
“You don’t fucking get to just-!”
“Eh, well, I think we do get to ‘just’, ‘cuz I’m bigger than you.” Larry teased in a manner both bitter and playful.
Travis scoffed and muttered a number of curses under his breath as he tried to no avail to escape the bigger man’s grasp. The room fell quiet as Larry watched with a satisfied expression.
It was a few minutes before Travis gave up. “Get off of me, my fucking leg is going numb.”
Larry sighed and rolled his eyes, getting off of Travis and sitting beside him on the floor. Travis sat up slowly, turning away from Larry and rubbing his right leg, now riddled with the unpleasant sensation of pins and needles. The room was basked in a tense silence as the two of them thought about what had just happened.
It wasn’t anything too unusual for the duo, they hadn’t exactly been too nice to each other since they were kids. They had a history of antagonizing each other long before Sal ever moved here and changed everything. They’d gotten in trouble all the time for fighting with each other back in high school, and while Travis had gotten Larry suspended on more than one occasion, he got his own punishments doled out back at home.
The sharp left turn their relationship took after they’d graduated was what Travis considered an accident, but the jury was still out on whether it was a good one or a bad one.
Larry was the first to break the silence. “…You should stay.”
Travis blinked, turning to the brunette with a cool rage. “You severely underestimate how pissed I am at you right now.”
“No,” Larry said, slowly wrapping his arms around Travis’s waist. After the previous commotion, Travis almost welcomed the feeling. All the heat of his rage was gone now, replaced with a tired anger that left him longing for something else.
Larry’s chin rested on Travis’s shoulder. “I just think you’re hot when you’re mad.”
Travis could hear the shit-eating grin on his face as his rage was re-ignited. He shoved Larry off of him and stood up. “Whaaaaaat?” Larry asked like an idiot.
“You’re such a fucking pig, you know that?” Travis stormed off to Larry’s bedroom, slamming the door behind him. Larry pinched the bridge of his nose as he heard the sound of his bedroom door locking, meaning that he wouldn’t be able to get back in unless he went all the way outside, behind the building, to the back door.
Larry sighed loudly, picking up his box of cigarette and his lighter from where they’d fallen on the floor during their fight. He plucked one out and leaned against a kitchen cabinet as he smoked for the third time that morning.
The distinct sound of the basement’s back-entrance slamming shut faintly made its way through his bedroom walls, and Larry shook his head.
Fucking A.
…
What a fucking asshole. Travis couldn’t believe Larry compared him to his father like that. Of all people, Larry knew some of the most about what his father did, having seen the scars on his body. Then having the gall to get him to stay afterward, saying it was hot that he was angry with him? Travis should’ve done more than just lock him out, he should’ve just fucking killed him.
Travis sped away from the Addison Apartments on his bike—no helmet. Sal would’ve bitched at him about that if he were there, he’s sure.
‘If Sal were there, that fight wouldn’t have happened the way it did.’
Travis gripped the handlebars of his bike tighter. He did not need to be thinking about Sal right now.
It was true, though. Sal was a great mediator, and in the past, he’d mitigated more than one argument between the two of them with astounding success. He was empathetic and understanding to both of them, and he found it easy to get to the root of their problems without demeaning either of them in the ways that their parents or school counsellors had a tendency to do. Even when their fights got physical, he never yelled or sought to dole out any punishment to either of them. Not that he could, he was a wimpy 5’6 with little muscle tone and joints that liked to pop out of their sockets at the worst times, but that fact had always stuck out to Travis.
These were just some of the many, many things that Travis couldn’t help but like about Sal, no matter how hard he tried not to.
But Sal wasn’t here right now. He was in LA, visiting Ashley. His girlfriend. In college.
Out of all the guys he knew in Nockfell, Sal was the last person that Travis figured would’ve been straight, but maybe he was just a cross-dressing contrarian after all.
He stopped in front of his house. His father’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so he checked his wristwatch. It was 11:47, and his father was probably going to stay in the church until at least 1 pm, likely later than that, so he didn’t need to worry for a while.
He walked his bike into the garage and went inside.
The garage led straight into the living room, where he found his younger sister, Madeline, sitting on the couch with her feet up on the coffee table, a hot bowl of porridge in her hands, wearing a pair of shorts a number of fingers shorter than the length tradition allowed for, all like their father hated. She threw him a glance out of the corner of her eyes before looking back to the TV, playing something violent.
“Dad’s suuuper mad at you.” Madeline snickered from behind her spoon.
“I don’t care what father thinks right now.” Travis replied, walking across the living room toward the kitchen.
“What are you, a fourteenth century monarch?” She teased, and began feigning a British accent. “I don’t quite care what father thinks right now, dear sister.” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, splaying herself out on the couch as dramatically as she could with a bowl of hot mush in her hands.
“One day I’ll die and I won’t have to deal with you anymore. I look forward to that day.” Travis said as he walked back in to the living room with a glass of water. He sat on the couch next to Madeline, setting his glass on the table and watching whatever she had on. The scene looked like body-cam footage of a police chase.
“What the hell are we watching?” Travis leaned back on the couch.
Madeline shrugged, humming an ‘I don’t know’ and saying, “Some cop show.” Her mouth was full of porridge.
“Ugh, don’t talk with your mouth full like that.” Said Travis, with a grimace.
“Ugh, don’t go whoring around on Saturday night so that I get yelled at when I don’t know where you’re at Sunday morning.” Said Madeline, mouth still full.
Travis sputtered. “I did not go whor- I’m not-! Fuck you!” Travis flailed a bit as he stumbled over his words.
Madeline hummed with a feline smile. “Mm, touchy this morning, are we?” She said. Travis just glared at her out of the corner of his eye. “Whatever.” He sat back into the couch, arms crossed.
After a few minutes, Travis spoke up. “Sorry you had to deal with dad this morning. Larry turned my alarm off again.” He muttered.
“Oh, so it was your stupid boyfriend again.” Madeline rolled her eyes.
“He is not my fucking-!” Travis nearly started yelling again, red in the face and everything, before he saw Madeline’s raised brow, and he cut himself off and sitting back at the couch, grumbling to himself. “For what it’s worth, I punched him for it.”
“Doesn’t dad say that violence is never the answer?” Pondered Madeline facetiously, the ghost of a backhand staining her cheek, and Travis gave a bitter laugh.
The two suddenly became very quiet when they heard the garage door opening, signifying the early return of their father and sister, Mary, from the church. They weren’t sure why he was coming home now, but they still knew what to do regardless. They turned to each other quickly, a non-verbal communication taking place between them.
Travis took Madeline’s porridge bowl, now empty, and his water glass, while Madeline ran up the stairs to change. Travis would do the dishes as Madeline came downstairs, pretending that she was in her room the whole time, and that she knew nothing of Travis’s morning whereabouts. She ran up the stairs so fast that there was virtually no sound as she did it, skipping four steps at a time on her long legs.
By the time the sound of the living room door opening made its way to his ears, Travis was washing up Madeline’s dishes in the sink and Madeline herself was nowhere to be seen. Travis steeled himself, trying to prepare for whatever assault that his father would unleash at him for being absent from the church this morning.
“Travis Jackson Phelps.” That deep voice rung cold in his ears, and his shoulders tensed. Travis took a quiet breath and tried not to show fear, but his father wasn’t fooled. “Where were you this morning?”
Travis didn’t turn around to face his father as he replied, washing the dishes with an unusually cool demeanor. “Prior engagement.” He said calmly.
“What ‘prior engagement’ could possibly be more important than your responsibilities in the Ministry? Your poor sister had to pick up your slack during services today.”
“Father, really, it’s alright.” Mary’s monotonous voice tried to quell their father’s rage.
“No it isn’t, Mary, this is the third time this has happened in the past eight months.” What, was he fucking counting or something?
Travis finished washing Madeline’s dishes and set them aside to dry on the towel next to the sink. “It won’t happen again.” He stated.
“What happened to the last two times you said that?”
“The problem wasn’t fixed the last two times. It’s fixed now.” Travis carefully removed the dishwashing gloves and hung them over the faucet.
“What problem, exactly?”
“Doesn’t matter, it’s fixed now.” Travis turned around with a nonchalant shrug.
“It had better be.” His father said, before leaning in very close to Travis, his voice quiet and his breath minty. “Because if I find out you’re hanging around that Johnson boy again, there will. Be. Consequences. Do you hear me loud and clear?”
Travis swallowed thickly, hairs on the back of his neck standing up. “Crystal.” He replied, his cool demeanor slipping as he struggled to keep his voice from shaking.
His father slammed his fist on the counter hard, and fuck, Travis flinched. “You had better show me some god damn respect before I lock you in your room!” The older man yelled in Travis’s face. “I said, do you understand me, boy!?”
Travis nodded as he swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yes sir.” He said quietly.
“Father, it might be best to lay down, now.” Mary appeared behind him like a ghost, her hand rubbing away the tension at his shoulder. Being the most loyal of the three siblings, they found that she was the only one who could calm him, ever since their mother left.
Kenneth remained in Travis’s face for a few seconds longer before his anger began to recede. “You’re right.” His father turned to leave the kitchen when he saw Madeline in the entrance, now wearing a knee-length skirt. She watched the interaction with a careful gaze.
“Madeline May. Why was your brother doing your dishes in the sink just now? That was your bowl in the sink.” Kenneth asked, and Madeline stuttered through a response, but was interrupted. “I know you know better than than to leave your dishes in the sink for everyone else. Don’t let it happen again.” He pushed past her out of the kitchen, heading upstairs and leaving a tense quiet behind him.
“He isn’t feeling very well this morning.” Mary broke the silence.
“When is he ever feeling well?” Madeline scoffed. Travis just shook his head, while his hands gripped the edge of the countertop so hard his knuckles turned white. It was all he could do to keep himself from exploding.
He made his way up the stairs and to his room, stretching out his hands and feeling the residual sting of the countertop’s sharp edges in his palms. It complimented the pain of his bruised ego quite nicely.
He hung his jacket on the back of his bedroom door, which had no locks on it.
All things considered, Travis had gotten a lot better over the years—he used to burn with shame and humiliation when his father got in his face like that, his face red and hot tears pricking his eyes. Then his father would often poke at him for crying like that, hitting him until he stopped, until he behaved like a real man. Now he bit his cheek, his tongue, wrung his hands, dug his palms into the counter, anything he could to distract himself from the pit that would grow in his stomach, sinking into his chest.
But no matter what he did, he still couldn’t keep himself from cracking under the weight of his father’s threats.
Under the weight of consequences.
And how pathetic he was for it.
He stared blankly at the bare, baby-blue walls of his bedroom. He had no posters or pictures—he wasn’t allowed . He sat in his lounge chair, which he only had because it was one of the old ones the church was throwing away as they got new furniture several years ago. He grabbed his headphones and a record from his slowly growing collection, an Art Tatum album, and threw it onto his phonograph-cassette-CD player, things he only had because he’d bought them himself after he started working at the supermarket. The phonograph was most of his first couple paychecks in one, after begging his father for a summer job at sixteen.
And here he was at twenty-one, still having to beg his father for time away from the church.
He was hoping things would be different by now, but they weren’t. Things have never changed. He was kind of holding out hope that when he turned eighteen, his father would somehow magically start seeing him as a person and let him live his life, but that didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen to Mary so why would it happen to him? He was still stuck in the same bedroom, with the same rules and the same lifestyle he’s always had. Stuck, pleading with his father for every little thing.
He never grew up, he just got taller.
At the end of the day, no matter what, his father had always won by the simple fact that Travis was a loser, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbled.
It’s just the way that God made him.
He hated the thought that Larry might be right, but ever since his father came home, the idea was biting at the back of his mind. He was twenty-one, but still a child. He’s never tried to change his life very much, he’s never made a difficult choice if he didn’t have to, and he’s certainly never stood up to his father in any meaningful way. He was just an overgrown church brat that didn’t know what to do with himself.
At least Mary had the excuse of having been comfortably numb for a decade, she didn’t change because she couldn’t. Travis was just a born and bred coward—he didn’t change because he didn’t want to.
Even their timid mother eventually got the balls to run away from it all, and oh, how that thought burned. She managed to run away from everything, and never looked back at any one of them.
A familiar sting came like needles to his eyes, and he dug his nails into his palm as hard as he could, until the joints in his fingers ached from the effort.
Of all the people he needed to be thinking about right now, his mother was so far down at the bottom that she might as well be six feet under.
Travis sunk further into his chair, pushing the heels of his palms into his burning eyes. He needed a distraction, and clearly music alone wasn’t going to be enough.
He wished he was at work right now.
He didn’t realize it when he was first applying for that job, he mostly just wanted to be able to have his own money to do what he wanted with, but work would become a kind of haven for Travis that he never would’ve considered. He used to hate the supermarket for all its disorganized noise, it was always bright and loud and full of crying babies. But somehow, over the years, he’d grown attached in a way that he couldn’t explain.
It was like the church, in a weird way. He arrived and he was given his tasks. They kept him busy, gave him something tangible to focus on so that the mild chaos of the people of Nockfell got to him just a little bit less. But most of all, it kept him away from his father. Often times other people, like his coworkers, were even pretty nice to him. They took him seriously. They joked with him. If he closed his eyes and pretended, it was almost like having friends.
Friends who were paid to be around him. And he was also being paid to be around them. It was a relationship where everyone wins.
He stared numbly at the landline on his desk, hoping that it would spring to life and he’d have an excuse to leave again, to have something to focus on for a handful of hours, to pretend that he had a life away from his home for just a little while, but it never did.
Residual embers of humiliation and rage still glowed inside him. The last portion of that interaction with his father kept sticking with him; the way he’d flinched, the way he’d caved so easily, the way he had to dig the sharp edge of the countertop into his palms to keep from crying.
‘Thanks, Larry’, Travis couldn’t help but think. ‘Those extra hours of sleep made my day that much easier.’
‘He’s just trying to help.’ A layer of his thought-consciousness tried weakly.
Pathetic.
‘I heard that.’ His brain responded.
Larry should consider not helping. Every time he tries to ‘help’ it turns out like this: Travis sitting in his bedroom, once again humiliated and pissed because he can’t stand up to his father. More than that, he sits in his chair, hot with shame because once again, Larry is right . He’s a moron, but he’s right, and Travis hates that someone so stupid could be right about so many things, but Larry was just like that. He was just like that, because he was an actual person who existed in the real world, meanwhile Travis often felt like he was pulled straight from an Ayn Rand novel; nothing more than a mouthpiece for the man that created him.
About halfway through the album, Travis took the record off the plate and put it away. His brain was too loud to be able to appreciate the music, he needed to quiet himself down.
He went over to his desk, pulling a key off of the keychain in his pocket and unlocking one of the drawers, opening it, and pulling out all of the CDs full of contemporary music and whatever other junk that Travis had collected and stored in there. He set all his crap onto his desk, leaving the drawer empty enough to pull up the false bottom, revealing a leather journal on the inside.
It was plain looking; brown, worn from a year or two of near-daily use, with a thin strip of a strong cloth wrapping all the way around it to keep it bound shut. He grabbed a pen from his desk and sat down, keeping an ear carefully tuned to the sounds of footsteps outside his room as he began writing.
I’m so tired of it all.
Tired of Larry, father. Tired of Sunday and the church. Tired of begging to be taken seriously. Tired of waiting for something to happen. Tired of waiting to live my own life. I’m even tired of being tired.
I’m so fucking sick of it.
As he wrote, he found that he struggled to formulate his thoughts into words. A lot of it was just meaningless gunk in his head; feelings of no apparent origin, memories that made his skin burn… This just wasn’t working. His leg bounced in his seat, tension in his arms, and he felt the energy building up the more he tried to write.
Abruptly, he slammed the journal shut.
He needed to go somewhere.
…
He tapped the toe of his shoe on the floor to make sure his foot was settled inside properly before he left, taking the right turn toward town. He had his wallet on him, maybe he’d go get himself something quick for lunch. As a treat.
After around fifteen minutes of walking, he was out of his neighborhood and by the park, a handful of people populating it in the post-church hours. He decided to take a break over by the old, run-down fountain in the middle, still full of dirty, stagnant water from the last rain and trash from the assholes around town with no respect for their surroundings. He took a seat on the cracked edge and checked his watch.
2:30 pm.
He wondered what he’d do with his time as he looked up from his watch when he spotted someone unexpected.
Under the shade of a large tree, Sal Fisher sat on the ground, legs splayed out in front of him while his back rested at the trunk. He was turned away from Travis at an angle, looking up, watching the sunlight filter through the leaves and branches above him. His long blue hair and the smoke of his cigarette both swept gently through the wind. The bottom strap of Sal’s prosthetic face was unbuckled so he could smoke properly.
He recalled about a week or so ago, Sal had gone over to LA to visit Ash, his girlfriend, at the art school she studied at. They’d started dating around a year and a half ago, before Ash had moved, and seemed to be going pretty steady, leaving Travis in a bitter haze he’d long since accepted. When Ash applied for college, they talked and bickered and waffled about long-distance before ultimately choosing not to break up, much to everyone’s surprise. It was a shocking choice considering the amount of relationships that utterly fail to survive long-distance, but it seemed like Ash and Sal were going steady in spite of how far apart they were.
Or maybe they weren’t.
Larry said he’d be gone for another few days at least. If he knew Sal was back early, Travis would’ve known it by now because he probably wouldn’t have been physically capable of shutting up about it.
That’s when Travis noticed the duffel bag next to Sal, sitting next to him like he hadn’t even gone home yet.
He watched the blue-haired man from across the park as he finished his cigarette and then pulled out another one almost immediately after stubbing out the first one on the ground.
Whatever all that was, it definitely didn’t look good. But it wasn’t any of Travis’s business, he’d deliberately spent the past several years trying to stay as far away from Sal as possible. Which has all gone exactly how he’d wanted it to, of course. Travis’s relationship with Larry, Sal’s closest friend, was most definitely a part of this plan, somehow, and he needn’t be questioned about any of it.
But as much as he wanted to see Sal happy, knew that Sal deserved to be happy, probably more than the rest of these assholes—himself included—he couldn’t help a selfish part of him that sat in the back of his head, hoping and waiting. The fact that he was back early and seemed stressed had him wondering, hoping against his better judgement.
As Travis stood up to re-tie one of his running shoes, his gaze seemed to catch Sal’s, and they stared at each other from across the park for what felt like half an hour. As he looked into the blank expression of Sal’s prosthetic, eyes obscured by the shadows of his plastic face, watching but not moving, Travis couldn’t help the pit of dread that grew in his stomach. When Sal turned his head back up to the branches of the tree, he couldn’t help but feel as if he'd seen something he wasn't supposed to.
He turned to go back on his walk, hoping that the exercise would put him in a better mood.
As he jogged into one of the local shopping centres, he saw the smoothie shop, Moodie’s. Three dollars later, he sat in one of the outdoor seats on the front patio, drinking a tropical fruit smoothie, watching as people perused the area, and at another table nearby, an argument was taking place.
“Oh yeah? And what are you going to do about it?” The platinum blond girl at the next table leaned back in the metal chair, legs extending outward in an obnoxious manner while she paused. In her hand, held up to her ear, was a bright pink cell phone. Her friends whispered amongst themselves as they watched her.
Suddenly, the girl laughed in response to whatever she’d heard on the other end of the line. “Yeah? Well, here’s my rebuttal, Christine.” She snapped her cell phone closed with a clat, grinning mischievously at the vindictive giggles of her friends.
“It’s so funny, how much power she thinks she has over me! I don’t live with her, I pay for my own shit, I can do whatever I want.” The blond leaned forward in her amusement, taking a sip from her own smoothie.
“How are you even supposed to be your own person when she’s like that? You literally can’t, she’s just jealous she can’t live through you anymore. She’s fuckin’ projecting so hard.” Said a brown-haired girl at the table, bracelets jangling as she gesticulated.
“People like that just want everyone to be miserable so they feel less shitty about the fact that they feel like shit all the time.” A black-haired girl spoke up from behind a comic book she was reading.
“Literally, cut the umbilical cord, lady.” Said the brunette.
“I don’t even get why she’s so obsessed with talking about how much I’ve disappointed her as a daughter, because like, you don’t impress me either, bitch. Forty-five with three ex-husbands and a Xanax addiction? The fuck do you mean I’ll never go to law school? What did you do with your life, you dumb bitch?” The blond leaned back in her chair, letting her head hang over the back of it as she stared up at the underside of the canopy guarding the smoothie shop’s patrons from the sun.
Travis wasn’t necessarily one to eavesdrop, but he found himself having a hard time not paying attention to the conversation considering they were right next to him. It tingled in his spine, and the more he listened, the more he couldn’t help the feeling that God was trying to tell him something, and he hated it.
He wasn’t even sure he believed in God, or rather, whether or not he wanted to, but everything about today was starting to feel too intentional for his liking. A sense of unease had been building up since he saw Sal earlier, and now it was only getting worse.
He stood up from his chair at the smoothie shop and decided to continue his walk. He’d like to find a quiet place to relax, where there were no teenagers or overheard conversations to remind him of how powerless he was against his father.
He decided to go for one of his favorite places, the local library.
He finished his smoothie on the way there and tossed the empty cup in a bin just outside the building.
Inside, the building’s air was cool and crisp, and it was quiet, the only sounds being that of the fluorescent lights above and the sounds of the air conditioner cooling the building. He’d stepped in and greeted Sarah at the front desk with a smile. She gave a shy one back before turning back to continue writing something in their ledger.
Travis had already known quite a bit about the local flora and fauna of Nockfell, but it was only the past two years that he’d started getting more heavily into the subject, and that made him grateful that the local library wasn’t in any short supply of information, despite their somewhat dilapidated nature. It made him passively wonder if there was a local botanist responsible for this, and if so, he quietly thanked them for their work.
He’d just finished reading a book about various plant species which were invasive to North America, and wanted something a bit more specific to the area. He perused the section of books related to botany, the dewey-decimal stickers on the spines of each book sticking out like sore thumbs, and an old-looking green book piqued his interest; ‘Nature in Nockfell: A Brief History of Nockfell’s Rich Forest Life’. He grabbed it off the shelf.
Travis was intimately familiar with Nockfell’s forests. Lacking any kind of a social life from the age of twelve and his home life only getting more stressful as he got older, Travis had grown up with plenty of time to explore the wooded areas of his town. He wouldn’t exactly describe himself as some kind of tree-hugger, but he’d developed a special attachment to the feeling of damp and pliant dirt under his bare feet, the sensation of a fresh breeze on his skin out by the lake, or the calls of the loons that sounded between the rustling of the forest’s leaves. To Travis, that was the sound of refuge.
More than anything else, though, Nockfell’s forests meant freedom. He was certain that nobody had explored them as extensively as he had over the years, not even Sal and Larry, and to Travis, that meant a kind of freedom to roam that nobody else had. When he was there, he felt like he could truly go anywhere, unconstrained by anybody.
Travis had even went to sleep in some of the numerous caves in the area on multiple occasions, when things were getting really bad at home. His father hated it, he didn’t know the area as well as Travis did, and it’d lead to more than one fruitless chase through the woods, as he viciously sought to punish Travis for something, but it always left Travis rather amused. It was the one place he could go and be truly unbothered.
As he flipped through the book, these thoughts formed idly in the back of his mind. They didn’t mean very much at first, but over the course of the next hour, they’d built up into a realization that dawned on him as he read.
He liked being outside because he hated his father.
It was a stupidly obvious observation, but it still sank in his gut like a stone, slow and heavy.
His father controlled every aspect of his life from birth to present; what he ate, who he spoke with, when he could go out and for how long, if he went to school, what he wore, how he walked, how he smiled, how he spoke, all of it, and now as he was finding out, he couldn’t even escape the notion of his father in the one thing that has provided him with the most comfort over the years, because at the end of the day, it was still about him. Even if it was about escaping him.
Kenneth Phelps was always inside, crammed somewhere in his study and probably developing all kinds of health issues from whatever vitamin D deficiency he definitely had. It was a miserable, air-conditioned, water-cooler life that made Travis’ joints hurt just thinking about it. The fact that he made it a point to spend so much time outside was something that differentiated him from his father, made him his own person in a way—or he thought that, at least.
Could he even really be his own person if the one thing he loved most was still about his father?
The pit in his stomach came back, and he decided to put the botany away for the time being.
He sat over in the youth nook that the library had recently thrown together, picking out a recent-looking magazine from the stand they’d set up, an issue of Better Home & Gardens. Not exactly youth-oriented, but it might be nice to pass the time looking at nice houses he could never afford and reading corny housekeeping tips.
The magazine was short and mostly ads, as most magazines tended to be these days, so he finished flipping through rather quickly. It was nothing special inside, he was already familiar with the housekeeping tips they had to offer, but there was a white townhouse they’d showed that had drawn his eye with its classic architecture.
He checked the time on his wristwatch and saw that it was 3:47 pm, now, meaning that the library was going to close soon. He frowned, realizing he still didn’t want to go home just yet, but as he left the building, he got an idea that seemed worthwhile.
He stopped by the liquor store, getting himself a cheap bottle of screw-top merlot. A bit early in the day to be drinking, but with the way his father was today, it’s not like he’d have the chance to go out again after he went home. Not to mention that he didn’t want to go home just to deal with his father while entirely sober, as he’s been all day. He’d been itching for a drink since he left Addison’s, anyway. That comment Larry had made after he punched him still weighed heavily on his mind, made him want to tear his skin off.
How Larry could say something like that to him was still beyond Travis’s understanding.
He knew what Kenneth was like, probably for years. Everyone knew. He beat his wife, he beat his kids, if they had a dog he probably would’ve beat it, too. All that man did was hole himself up in his office at the church, then his office at home, and he threw tantrums whenever literally anything didn’t go his way by screaming at the first person that walked in his direction.
Being the leader of a death cult already made him a pretty irredeemable person, but even outside of that, he still had no redeeming qualities, not at as a father, as a person. Even as a pastor, his sermons were terrible, full of this pseudo-intellectual prose, and they were more often than not just inflammatory and helped nobody.
‘That’s right. Just like your fuckin’ dad does it.’
Bullshit.
Travis punched Larry because he was being a dickhead. That had nothing to do with his father and everything to do with Larry doing everything in his power to make his life harder simply because he wanted to, and he didn’t care to listen. Larry was the asshole, he was asking for it.
So fuck Larry, and fuck Kenneth Phelps. Travis was going to go to the lake and drink himself stupid and hopefully fall into the water and drown.
He walked out of the liquor store, bottle in hand, placed into a neat paper bag, making his way to the park. The park was a great place to get to the lake since the two were so close together. There was a trail for normal people to walk along, but it only lead to one side of the lake and it was often full of people, so Travis wouldn’t be going there. He would be taking what he considered to be the more scenic route, where he would emerge at the other side of the lake where he could be alone.
As he walked through the park, he looked at the spot where Sal had been sitting earlier. He wasn’t there anymore. He didn’t dwell too much on it, but in the back of his mind, he hoped that Sal was alright.
He ducked under branches and stepped on dried out leaves on the forest floor, enjoying the shine of the afternoon sun through the tops of the trees during his walk to his spot at the edge of the lake. He emerged, feeling a bit refreshed as he approached the wet ground at the lake’s mouth, finding that large, flat rock he like to sit on.
He popped the cap off of his bottle and put it in his pocket—he wouldn’t want to sully this place by littering all over it, there weren’t any trash cans in this area. He took his shoes and socks off, then took a swig of his drink. Grabbing a nearby stick, he carved a pound symbol into the damp ground for a game of tic-tac-toe. If he’d remembered to bring his deck of cards, he could’ve played solitaire, but he was in a rush to leave the house, so this is what he had.
As the alcohol started to hit him, he took in his surroundings more carefully.
It was so beautiful here in the forest that he wished he could live in it. He always envied Snow White and the seven dwarves for their little cottage, far away from everything and everyone. The refuge that she had there from the queen, the dwarves she’d made friends with. He wished his father would poison him just like Snow White’s step-mother did. It’d be nice to sleep so peacefully that it was like death, just to get away from it all.
Waking up to the kiss of a handsome prince wouldn’t be so bad, either.
That thought made him burn a bit in his drunken haze, but he imagined it anyway, taking a break from his third game of tic-tac-toe to stare at the lake as the sky began to darken. But as he imagined the scene in his head, the only person he could think of to wake him up from that poison slumber was that moron, Larry Johnson.
Larry was no prince. He was an asshole, he’d probably leave Travis there to die or something.
He took a long drink before he frowned as he looked back down at his game.
That wasn’t true.
Larry was a dickhead and a moron and Travis hated him, but he was never mean. If someone dropped something on the ground, he’d run to pick it up for them. He helps people in parking lots load big, heavy things in their cars, he does odd jobs around the Addison Apartments for free, and when they’re alone and the moment is right, there’s a kind of tenderness in Larry’s eyes that Travis doesn’t normally see. It’s a moment where all the tension between them has melted, and he’s soft.
There was a lot between them, most of it a kind of sexually charged hatred, but when it comes down to it, Larry’s afforded him much more patience and understanding than Travis would like to give him credit for, and he hated that. It made him feel cared for, like he’d be worried if something happened to Travis. It was stupid and selfish, but the ache in his chest subsided in those rare moments that Larry held his face in his big, calloused hands. He couldn’t help it.
He took another drink as he thought about his father again.
He’d never understand, and if he found out Travis had been lying to sleep with hang out with Larry again, he didn’t even want to think about what the consequences would be.
Consequences.
He hated that word.
The way it spat itself out of his father’s mouth, like it was the inevitable will of God that was going to punish him, and not his father’s own hand, belt, hair brush, sandal, wooden spoon, whatever he could grab.
The anxiety of his father finding out again made him sick to his stomach. He still remembers the feeling of rice under his knees, the belt on his backside, the tightened curfews and thinly veiled threats of therapy.
He’d never said it outright, but it’s not like his father was completely unaware. Travis knew that. Twenty-one and he’s never been seen with a girl he wasn’t related to for more than five minutes. Or anyone for that matter, but it’s not like his father needed to think too hard when his hair brushed the tops of his ears and he didn’t push it back, the girls at church asking him about his coconut body wash, the way he could name more poets than football players. As he got older there’d been more than one person whispering about how that dog don’t hunt, and Kenneth hated it.
Not just because Kenneth hates faggots, but because he was a security threat.
If he couldn’t even follow the simple direction of ‘get married to a woman so you can have an heir’, then how in the hell was anyone supposed to believe that he was actually loyal to the empire of death that was the Phelps Ministry? His sisters weren’t really capable of it. Mary was simply too medicated to lead anything, and Madeline was even more of a security risk than Travis was, being so openly defiant and resisting their father’s every whim in whatever way she could. If she knew about the cult, she’d kill herself trying to take them down.
Not to mention that they were both women . For that reason alone, Kenneth already saw them as disappointments. Travis was supposed to actually be worth raising and he was still a failure, because like his sisters, he was into dudes.
Travis chuckled to himself bitterly. He wondered how his father felt about that. After literally generations of work from the Phelps family, the Ministry might actually fall apart because of two girls and a faggot. How funny it was, that their misogyny and demands for conformity could un-do them.
Still, if Travis had any hope of ever taking them down himself, he’d have to find a way to bend to their will.
That’s what Larry didn’t understand.
He couldn’t just leave like his mother did. If he left now, knowing everything he did, he’d never have a day of peace for the rest of his life.
It’s not Larry’s fault. He didn’t know about any of this, neither did any of the others in their little friend group, and if Travis could help it, he’d keep them all away from it for as long as possible. Larry’s already witnessed one murder caused by the Ministry in the past, Sal’s been through enough for an entire lifetime, and neither Ash nor Todd would ever believe any of this crap because they were both too normal, all things considered.
Mary was too loyal to take them down, Madeline would never be accepted in the first place.
He was the only one who could do it.
It was starting to get dark now, and he was almost finished with his bottle. The alcohol was really in his system, now. He wobbled as he stood up, walking to the edge of the lake. He watched the waves gently creep up at the mouth before slinking back, and the pressure on his mind was immense.
Why did his mother get to leave while he had to stay here?
Why did all of this have to be on him?
If the cult was going to fall apart anyway because of their own bullshit, what was even the point of being there? Why not step aside and just watch them crash and burn?
The water lapped at his bare feet, cool and soothing. The sun was setting in hues of purple and orange behind the tall trees, and with one last drink from the bottle, Travis had put himself together.
He knew what he was going to do, now.
On the way back to the house, he tossed the bottle of wine in a bin at the park. He was more than a little drunk, somewhat stumbling along the way as he walked, but he managed to stabilize himself passably as he approached his neighborhood. He slapped his face to ground himself, letting the humid summer air sink into his skin. Fear and anxiety toiled in his gut, but he stomped them out. He couldn’t let hesitation ruin this moment.
He stood outside of the gate to the house, looking up at the window of the bedroom he grew up in. His sixteen year old self stared back from just behind the curtain.
As he walked through the fence into the front yard, he was hit with a memory of a dislocated shoulder as his father yanked him up from the ground when he was eight, because his room wasn’t clean.
On the porch, at the front door, another one. Age six, his father had grabbed him by the hair and hissed in his face about the consequences of not listening to him.
He stepped inside and the stairwell was to his right. Another memory there. Twelve, his father had pushed him down onto the landing, holding him down until Travis had managed to wriggle free, kneeing his father in the face as he did. Oh, how he was beat for that one.
He made his way up the stairs clumsily, pausing in the middle to re-stabilize himself before he continued to his room.
His room had its own set of memories; yanked out of bed by his ears, hiding under blankets in the closet, father finding his journal and burning it, the wine he’d steal from the church before he could buy it. He’d pour the wine into his school water bottle and piss in the empty ones to avoid encountering his father in the house. At night, he’d lay in bed covered in bruises, begging for God to save him and dreaming of the life he’d make for himself in a big city like New York, away from all of this.
Travis grabbed his old backpack and started stuffing things inside of it. He wasn’t incredibly attached to most of his things, but there were some things he just couldn’t get go of.
His new journal (it was almost a year old now, but he still thought of it as the new one), his mother’s favorite sweater (he never wore it because it was a soft pink, but maybe after he left he would), a few days’ worth of clothes, some of his favorite novels. Then he looked over to his bed.
Sitting on top of his pillow watching him pack was an old stuffed rabbit, as old as Travis was because he’d had it since he was born. It used to be white, but now it was somewhat of a matted, muddy greyish-brown color. He remembered when he was small enough that he could cuddle his whole self up to it, and now, as an adult, it was as small as a newborn child.
He hated that he was going to have to tell Larry, but he’d never be able to forgive himself if he left it behind.
He went downstairs carefully, bag in hand, and he walked through the living room.
“Hey, dinner’s almost ready.” Madeline said, turning around from her seat at the piano. Then, she noticed his bag. “Are you going somewhere again?”
“Just puttin’ somethin’ outside.” Travis replied, his words a bit slurred, leaving no room for Madeline to ask questions as he went out the garage door and set the bag next to his bike. As he walked back inside, Madeline raised a brow at him, but her confusion turned to mischief as Travis quietly put a finger to his lips just before he tripped over his own feet and nearly fell over. He corrected himself quickly, but it wasn’t swift enough to stop Madeline from noticing what was up with him.
‘Are you drunk?’ She asked him, so quiet that she was almost just mouthing the words to him. She seemed more amused than anything else.
“Maybe. Shut up. Don’ worry ‘bout it.” Telling her not to worry about it when there was very likely about to be a huge commotion in the house in a bit was probably a bit rude in hindsight, but in all fairness, he was also drunk.
Travis walked into the kitchen where Mary was cooking.
“What’s for dinner?” Asked Travis, and he walked over next to her to get a good look.
“Chicken breast with steamed vegetables and mashed potatoes. It’s almost done.” Mary smile warmly, seeming rather content despite the events of that morning. He hated to have to break that rare smile of hers, and he hoped that somehow she might forgive him later, if God wouldn’t.
“I’ll set the table for you.” Travis said, noticing that it hadn’t been done yet, and Mary seemed a bit surprised at that. “Oh, thank you, Travis. I got so caught up in my cooking that I hadn’t even set the plates out.” She laughed to herself.
Travis grabbed the clean place-mats and set out the dinnerware on the table. His hands were a bit shaky, but at this point he was an expert at doing things whilst drunk, so he managed to keep himself steady.
As he finished setting the table, Mary soon came in to put the food on each plate. Travis poked his head out of the kitchen entrance and shouted, “Dinner’s ready!” The rustling of footsteps upstairs soon followed.
After the mealtime prayer is when they were all permitted to begin eating.
“Where have you been today, Travis?” His father asked, breaking the silence, and he and Travis’s sisters all looked at him expectantly.
“Out.” Travis said, before remembering that’s what got him in trouble that morning, too vague. “I went for a walk, went to the library, sat by the lake. Got myself a smoothie at one point from Moodie’s.” He made sure to speak somewhat slowly and deliberately to avoid slurring his words too much.
His father scoffed at that. “You don’t need to be filling your body with that crap.” He said, seeming satisfied with Travis’s answer.
“Yeah, well, it’s my money.” Travis shrugged and continued to eat, but the narrowing of his father’s eyes at the disrespect didn’t go unnoticed by either Travis or his sisters. It was something Travis wouldn’t have normally said, at least not like that, if he were sober.
“You should still be doing your best to respect the body that God gave you. Filling it with tons of sugar isn’t good for you.”
“Neither is bland food, but you don’t see me complaining.” Travis shrugged and continued to eat slowly.
Kenneth slammed his fist on the table. “Don’t you dare insult your sister’s cooking like that! Apologize.” Mary looked to Travis, a bit shocked, and while Travis hated to see it, a little disappointed as well.
“Mary’s cooking is just fine.” He corrected himself, looking directly to his sister. “It’s just that, somehow, every time you leave for one of your trips we’re busting out the garlic salt and lemon pepper—which would go great with this chicken, by the way, Mary.” Mary nodded curtly, clearly uneasy about this situation. “It’s when you come back that the food gets bland again.”
“I have high blood pressure. Salt does not suit my health.” Kenneth hissed.
“You don’t need to have salt, just us. ‘Cus we want to actually enjoy our food, right Maddie?” Travis looked over to Madeline, who’d been watching the scene quietly as she ate. She seemed surprised that Travis had pointed her out, and gave a small nod in agreement.
“We don’t need to be putting unnecessary work onto Mary like this. She does enough for the house. Besides, spices cost money.” Kenneth replied.
“W- it takes two shakes of your hand to add some lemon pepper to some chicken, and we are clearly not hurting for money right now. Hell, I’ll buy it if you’re so worried.” He shrugged.
“Language!” Kenneth snapped.
Travis pulled his hand down his face. “Sorry, dad-”
“-I’m sorry, father.” The older man corrected, and Travis stared blankly at him for a few seconds before adjusting his apology.
“Father.” He said curtly. “Sorry, father.”
There was a tense pause as the two stared each other down, before Kenneth got up out of his chair.
“I have had just about enough of your attitude, boy.” He grabbed Travis by the shirt and got up close to his face. “This rebellious phase is over. You will cut your hair, dress properly, and you will adhere to your curfews from this point on.”
“Or what? You’ll ground me?” Travis scoffed, before his tone turned much darker. “I’m twenty-one years old. What would you possibly do to me?” He was goading his father, and Kenneth knew it. Implicating his violent tendencies, but also reminding him of the fact that he was Kenneth’s only son, the only hope for the Ministry.
“I’ll kick you out on the streets.” Kenneth said, after too long of a pause.
“Oh boy, kicking me out on the streets, how terrifying when I have money. And friends.” Travis rolled his eyes.
“Friends like whom?” Kenneth spat, leaning in so close that Travis could feel his breath on his face.
“Friends like Gina Stockson, Andy Finklestein, and, oh, I don’t know, Larry Johnson.” Travis chose some of people most inflammatory to his father. Gina was an out butch lesbian, the Finklesteins were Jews, and Larry Johnson was, well, that was left unspoken between the two of them.
“Are you drunk right now?” Kenneth spat, and Travis realized he was close enough to smell the alcohol on his breath. Travis was hoping that it would’ve been covered up by now, but apparently bland food doesn’t make for a very good alcohol mask.
Travis let his façade slip a bit. “Maybe. What’re you gonna do about it?”
Kenneth threw Travis to the ground, and both Madeline and Mary gasped, moving away from the two, knowing it could get explosive with Kenneth’s tendencies.
Travis quickly recovered, having been through a lot worse than this from his father in the past, and being drunk certainly helped with the pain of being thrown around like a ragdoll—a trick he’d learned in high school.
“Room. Now.” Kenneth barked, but Travis decided enough was enough.
“No, I don’t think I will.” Travis shrugged, walking out of the kitchen toward the living room.
“Excuse me?” Kenneth was quick behind him, grabbing him by the shoulder and whipping him around.
“You heard me. I’m not going to my room, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” No longer having to hide that he was drunk as much, his words began to slur and sounded much more playful than they should have considering the situation he was in. At the edge of the living room, Travis spotted his sisters, watching the conflict carefully. Madeline seemed shocked and maybe even a little scared, while Mary had the same blank expression she’s always worn in situations like these since she was a teenager, her dull hawk’s eyes catching every detail.
Kenneth backhanded Travis’s face, but he could hardly feel the sting in his drunken haze. Still, he stumbled backward and landed against a side table near the couch, causing the metal lamp to wobble and fall over, light flickering.
“I will drag you up there myself, by your hair.” Kenneth growled.
“No, you’re gonna kick me out. That’s what you said earlier, and you meant it, right? You’d never just threaten me with something you’d never do, right?” Travis laughed as he stood himself back up.
“Stop this insolence, boy!” Kenneth stormed forward toward him.
“No, because you’re gonna kick me out, and while I’m gone, I’m gonna be going to college or something, going to parties and having homosexual orgies with fratboys.” He made sure to put extra emphasis on the most inflammatory words and dressing them up with punctuating hand gestures.
Kenneth grabbed him by the jacket and threw him to the ground once more, this time climbing on top of him and pinning him there.
“You will stop this, immediately! You will be confessing your sins and repenting for this!” Kenneth shouted in his face, and Travis cringed when his father’s spit had landed on his cheek.
“What, like you don’t know.” Travis spat back lowly.
“Don’t know what?”
“That I’m a faggot.”
Kenneth’s face turned nearly red with rage. He pulled himself off of Travis and dragged him up from the floor by his hair, and Travis hissed in pain. Kenneth punched him in the stomach, nearly making Travis vomit, before he punched Travis in the cheek, causing him to crash back down to the floor on his hip, hard. He was going at Travis a lot harder than he has ever before, and Madeline yelled from behind the two, trying to convince their father to stop, but her pleas went ignored. Mary herself remained quiet as she watched.
Kenneth grabbed Travis off the ground by the collar of his shirt again, this time pinning him to the wall next to the garage door, grabbing him by the face and forcing him to make eye contact. Madeline pounded at his back, shouting something Travis couldn’t quite make out, but with one arm keeping Travis on the wall, he used the other to shove her back onto the ground hard. Travis looked to her with an apologetic expression before Kenneth started screaming in his face again.
“No son of mine is going to be a fucking AIDS monkey, do you understand me!?” He screamed, but Travis could only laugh. Kenneth growled at the disrespect, tightening his grip on his son’s face as he punched him in the other cheek, only this time he didn’t stop. He went for Travis’s mouth, his nose, the boy’s face becoming covered in his own blood, but Kenneth kept going.
Madeline appeared behind him again, grabbing at Kenneth’s shirt, his arm, pounding on his back, anything to get him to stop. She yanked his hair, pulling his head back and causing him to lose his grip on Travis just a smidge, thanks to that distraction, Travis had an opening.
He stomped on his father’s foot, causing him to curse and walk back, before Travis then kneed his father in the dick. It sent the older man crumbling to the floor with a shout while Madeline gave a nervous, adrenaline-fueled laugh, and the entire situation gave Travis just enough time to run to his bike in the garage.
Locking the garage door behind him as quickly as he could, he shook while waiting impatiently for the big door to open, bag in hand. His father fumbled with the garage door handle, pounding on the wood and shouting at Travis to let him in. He jumped at every sound, knowing that if his father were to break that door down, his sister wouldn’t be able to do much to stop Kenneth from beating him to death. As the entrance door quieted behind him, the garage’s car door opened in full, revealing the pouring rain outside. Travis cursed under his breath, but hopefully the rain might wash some of the blood off his face.
He began to ride down the driveway, just as his father ran out the front door of the house, attempting to chase him. The rain was cold and heavy, quick to soak into his clothes and slow him down, but he didn’t let it get to him.
His father was quick to follow him into the street. Bursting through the fence gate, reaching and managing to find purchase with the hood of Travis’s jacket, Kenneth nearly toppled him over, but it wasn’t enough. Travis managed to escape his grasp, steadying his bike again on the slick roads while Kenneth shouted and cursed behind him.
Jaw tight, teeth bared, covered in blood and bruises, heart beating out of his chest, Travis moved as fast as he could. The bruise on his hip throbbed with each move of his right leg, but he continued on regardless. His hands gripped the handlebars so hard his knuckles were white, and he lost sight of everything that wasn’t directly in front of him. He couldn’t be sure if it was the survival instincts or the alcohol, but he thanked God that it kept him going in spite of the pain and the alcohol in his system.
The only thing that brought him solace was the sound of his father’s voice fading in the distance as he rode away.
As he cut through the flooded streets on his bike, through the rain, he only had one destination in mind.
Nockfell had an extensive cave system that Travis had gotten pretty familiar with over the years, and he was more than familiar with sleeping in them. In his drunken haze, He figured he’d spend a night or two there before cashing out his bank account and ditching town. He didn’t exactly have a plan, but he would figure it out tomorrow, he didn’t care anymore as long as he got away from his father.
Maybe he could even bring Madeline with him.
The cave he was thinking of was deep in the forest, on the other side of town. It wasn’t incredibly large, but it was out of the way and seemed mostly unknown to the local teenagers, so it wasn’t full of garbage and he wouldn’t be bothered if he slept off the wine there. It was his best bet right now.
The only problem would be making sure his body could actually get him there.
By the time he was passing the Addison Apartments, his legs were only slowing him down, muscles burning in spite of the icy rain soaking him to the bone, and his vision was doubling from the alcohol, throwing him off balance. He closed one eye, but it didn’t help that much, he was getting dizzy and he was struggling to keep his bike straight. Coupled with the way his body ached from the fight with his father, and not to mention the rain, keeping himself focused on the road ahead was proving to be difficult.
Up ahead, the road took a sharp left turn, but to get to the cave he needed to go straight. The roads in this part of town tended to be unfinished, so the ride was a hard jump from road to grass that jostled Travis in his bike seat and made his head hurt more than it already did, and he struggled to recover. His bike wobbled, and his equilibrium was thrown off from the jump. One of his feet fell off the pedals, and with how fast he was going, he couldn’t figure out how to get it back on. He would’ve hit the brakes, but his hands were gripping the handle bars so tight he couldn’t move them.
Travis knew it was already too late by the time he’d seen what was ahead, and the only thing he could do after that point was accept his fate.
Seconds after getting onto the grass, Travis’s bike hit a ditch, and that’s when everything went dark.
…
Larry was walking back to the apartments from the convenience store, watching the thunderstorm from underneath his umbrella as he carried his six pack with him.
He loved the rain, everything about it. The sound, the cool water under his shoes, the damp air, the smell. The sounds of thunder were something he found so calming and peaceful, especially at night like this, and he needed it today.
His fight with Travis that morning left him endlessly frustrated with the blond, which wasn’t abnormal for the two of them. They bickered with each other pretty often about a lot of things. Travis’s father was just one of them, but it was by far the biggest thing they kept fighting about, over and over again, and the closer they got, the more Larry wanted to pull him away from it all, and the more resistant Travis seemed to the idea.
If Larry could just keep him away from Kenneth, then maybe he could finally keep him safe. If he could be their ally, then maybe Travis could get Madeline and Mary away from him, too. At the very least, having Travis on their side could make him a powerful ally in taking down the Phelps Ministry. The amount of things he had gone through with Kenneth could probably put the man in jail for decades if he somehow didn’t get the death penalty from everything else he’d done.
Of course, all that hinged on convincing Travis that he actually was the leader of a death cult that the Phelps Ministry was hiding. He didn’t seem to know anything about what his father was doing behind the scenes, and every time Larry tried to hint that he knew something, he never seemed to pick up on it. Not to mention that as a person, Travis seemed a bit too skeptical to believe that his father could’ve been doing something like that right under his nose, anyway.
He sighed through his nose as he remembered their fight again. Why did this have to be so fucking hard? Why couldn’t Travis just forget about his father and take care of himself for once? Why was it so hard to see that Larry just wanted to take care of him?
The sound of a shout and a crash interrupted his thoughts.
A biker had passed by him a few seconds ago, something he’d barely registered even though it was pretty weird for someone to be riding their bike in the rain like this. Whoever it was must’ve crashed somewhere. He turned around, seeing a bike on the ground a couple hundred feet way from that sharp turn in the road, over on the grass by what looked like a ditch. He grimaced as he saw the rider’s leg sticking out from the ground, hoping some dumbass didn’t kill themself riding a bike on a slick road in the rain. Larry’s had enough with all the dead bodies these past few years.
At least this one would’ve been some kind of accident, instead of another piece of a cannibal murder cult conspiracy.
He jogged over, almost slipping on the mud, and as he approached the ditch, he realized the rider’s clothing looked a bit too familiar. His gut sank as he realized it was Travis. He dropped his six pack on the ground and held his umbrella with his underarm as he carefully stepped into the ditch.
Travis looked like absolute hell.
There was blood all over his face, partially washed off from the rain. His lip was split and he had a black eye, and his knuckles were bruised, all of which could be assumed to be from Kenneth, and he was covered in mud and more scrapes from his crash into the ditch. As Larry approached him, he wasn’t moving.
Falling to his knees, the brunette grabbed Travis’s face, gently patting his cheek, and he sighed in relief as Travis seemed to stir. He wasn’t fully conscious, though, and that was a problem. Larry wrapped his arm around the blond to pull him up when he noticed he had on his backpack, and he couldn’t help but wonder where Travis might’ve been going. Was he trying to get to the apartments? As he pulled Travis out of the ditch, he smelled something strange on his breath.
Was that alcohol? Was Travis drunk right now?
What the actual fuck happened to him today?
He set Travis on the flat ground, holding the umbrella over the both of them and Travis stirred some more.
“Travis? Travis, are you okay? Holy shit, dude.” Larry kept patting his face and brushing his hair away as Travis began to wake up with a groan.
The blond opened his eyes blearily, brushing Larry’s hands away from his face and immediately rolling over on his elbow to vomit.
Larry scooted himself backwards a bit to give him some space. “Jesus Christ.” He said under his breath, and he ran his hand through his hair. “Talk to me, dude, what the fuck is going on?”
Travis continued to cough and sputter up vomit into the dirt, back turned to Larry, then paused, staring at the damp grass he was laying on. He ran his tongue around his mouth and spat the taste of bile out on the ground as well before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Lotta stuff.” The blond said.
Thinking about their fight, Larry couldn’t help but wonder if this was all because of the alarm.
“…Because of this morning?” He asked carefully.
There was a long pause as Travis thought about the question, struggling to collect his thoughts a bit because of the alcohol, disorientation from the crash, and the adrenaline of everything he’d gone through that night.
“…No.” He said.
Ultimately, nothing about what had happened with his father that night was anyone’s fault but his own. He goaded his father into giving him a reason to leave, doing it without a solid plan of where he was going to go because he was drunk and pissed off, and the result of his inebriated genius was drunk-driving his bicycle into a ditch and knocking himself out.
But unfortunately that answer only confused Larry even more.
“Oh.” That’s all the brunette could really say to that revelation. “What actually happened, then?” He asked, but then changed course. “Actually, no, don’t answer that, let’s get you to my place first. Can you walk?”
The blond only vaguely vocalized in response.
Larry helped Travis drunkenly stumble to his feet before grabbing his six-pack from the ground. They decided to leave the bike in the ditch for the time being and deal with it later. The duo trudged back in the direction of the apartments, a quick bike ride away but on their feet, it was about a ten minute walk. With Travis in the state he was in, it was almost twenty, but at no point did Larry ever try to rush him. He kept an arm around Travis’s shoulder to stabilize him as he walked, pulling him back from stumbling off the sidewalk when he lost his balance. It almost made Travis feel like a dickhead, and an idiot, for how he was going to have to explain his situation to Larry pretty soon.
When they got to Larry’s basement back door, the rain had finally began to properly lighten up, and the entire place smelled like fresh rain. It was almost as nice as the smell of the forest just after a rainstorm. It was a surprisingly peaceful moment outside the apartments considering everything that had just happened. It almost made Travis feel a bit more at peace with it all.
Larry gently pushed the other inside first, and Travis faltered a bit as he stepped forward, sitting at the top of the stairs because he didn’t trust himself to go down them. Larry locked the door behind them.
“Do you… Need a change of clothes?” Larry asked carefully, not sure what mental state Travis was in at the moment.
“…Yeah. Yeah, that’d be nice.” Travis said after a period of trying to catch his breath. He coughed, choking on some of the nose blood that had made its way down the back of his throat.
Larry walked further into his room and dug around for something clean enough that Travis wouldn’t bitch at him for it, settling on some flannel pajama pants and a dubiously clean band shirt for something Travis would probably hate, had he ever heard of them in the first place. He tossed them over to Travis, and the blond didn’t even try to catch them, letting the clothes hit him on the torso gently.
That’s how Larry knew he was really fucked up. He was quiet, no complaints about the clothes, no snide comments about the holes in the bottoms of the pants, about Larry’s fashion choices, none of the usual stuff. It seemed to put Larry on edge as he sat on the steps and watched as Travis changed carefully and slowly, setting his soaking wet clothes and backpack to the side by the door.
“Do you need to go to the hospital?” Larry probed carefully, trying to gauge Travis’s state.
Travis held the dry clothes in his hands, staring at them blankly. “Don’t think so.” His voice was scratchy and weak. He pulled the dry shirt over his head and took off his soaking wet jeans. He didn’t bother with shame or embarrassment, and the other didn’t bother to look away, there was no point.
Larry didn’t really trust him, so while Travis seemed coherent enough, he opted to keep an eye on him for as long as he could anyway considering he’d vomited immediately after biking head-first into a ditch. He knew a thing or two about head injuries, Travis had given him a couple.
“What happened?” The brunette broke the silence the room had fallen into as Travis changed, but the blond paused, unsure of how to put it. Travis looked at the floor and licked the blood off of his split lip.
“I came out to my dad.” He said simply.
“You what!?” Larry balked.
“You were right.” Travis continued with a shrug, leaning against the wall of the stairwell and staring off to the side. “I’m a grown fuckin’ child. Never made a real choice in my entire god damn life. I guess I just wanted to change that.”
“Shit.” Larry said lowly, pulling his hand down his jaw. “I never thought you’d actually try to listen to me.”
“Wassat supposed to mean?” Travis would’ve spat that sentence out had he the energy to be irritated at the thoughtless comment.
Larry sighed and looked to the ceiling, running a hand through his hair. “It’s not about you, it’s about Kenneth. He already knows we hang around each other, so we’re all gonna have targets on our backs for this.” Not just the two of them, but the rest of Larry’s friends were all subject to scrutiny over this.
“I was trying to avoid that.” Travis said, looking back to the floor, rubbing the back of his neck. “Somehow.” He added with a sigh. Suddenly he found it hard to remember what it was he was actually trying to do.
The room fell quiet again as neither of them really knew what to say about this situation. The air between them was heavy and thick in a way that couldn’t be explained away by the stagnant air of the ancient apartment complex.
“Sorry.” Travis broke the silence with his muttered apology, still not looking at the taller man down the stairs. “About punching you. ‘Bout all this. You shouldn’t have to deal with this shit right now.” He couldn’t fully understand what had compelled him to apologize, it wasn’t something he normally did when he fought with Larry, but he was drunk and he felt like an idiot now that all the adrenaline has worn off. It felt like the only thing he could say.
“It’s not your fault.” Larry approached him on the stairs carefully, his voice a lot calmer than Travis thought it should’ve been in this situation. “It just means that we need to lay super low and come up with a plan in case something happens. Can you stand up at all?” Larry tried to help him up, but Travis pushed him away, and now he started to have the energy to fight with him again.
“I got it, I got it.” Travis spat under his breath. “What do you mean in case something happens?”
“I mean, like, I think your father is going to try and kill you because you’re a security risk. Failing that, he’ll probably try to kill me and my friends to try and get back at you.” Larry said flatly.
That sentence made Travis’s blood turn cold. Security risk? Murder? He knew something. Scratch that, from the sound of it, Larry knew a lot of something.
Travis looked up from the ground, making very tense eye contact with Larry, and as they stared at each other, they realized the secrets they’d been keeping from each other weren’t actually secrets.
“Larry,” Travis asked carefully. “What do you know about my father?"