Chapter Text
“Be good for your Uncle Jack,” Holland told Holly as he placed his suitcase in the corner and out of the way of the mob of airline travelers. He pressed a kiss to her forehead, and was instantly rewarded with a moody glare and crossed arms. He frowned. “Come on sweetie, don’t I get a hug goodbye?”
The terminals of LAX were, as usual, packed with hoards of sunburned tourists and tired businessmen in crumpled suits spilling their coffee into already stained carpets. The air was hazy and stunk of cigarette smoke, though no one seemed to notice or care. Holland, Jackson, and Holly had pushed their way passed shin-high swinging suitcases and knee-high escaped toddlers into a little empty space near the corner of the window to say their goodbyes.
“You shouldn’t be going alone!” Holly huffed.
Through the glass behind them, Jackson watched a plane slowly roll into the terminal gate, wobbling a little, struggling to aline itself with the jetway. He wondered if the pilot was drunk, and then wondered if his musings weren’t a little hypocritical, given that he and Holland had just spent an hour bellied up to the Sky High airport bar.
A few months ago, the two of them had made a pact to abstain from day drinking while working cases, but today Holland was only going up to Berkley to bring back a teenage runaway. “Once or twice a year, her parents give me a tiny fortune to bring her home,” he’d said. “Easy money. She’s always in the same hang outs. I could do this one blitzed, blind, and with one hand behind my back.” So they made an exception. With Holland, there were a lot of exceptions.
Holly, however, was not so easily convinced. “Honey, how many times have I brought Sarah Wilcox home all by myself?” Holland asked her.
Holly sighed. “Six.”
“And how many time have I gotten hurt doing it?”
“Twice.”
“You see? Those are pretty good odds.” He gave her another kiss and a tight squeeze. “I’ll be back soon, I promise.”
“Pinky?”
“You bet.” Holland hooked fingers with her, then turned to Jackson. “Try not to do anything insane until I get back, man.”
“Who, me? You’re the insanity magnet, not me. My life was normal until I met you.”
“Not normal, just boring,” Holland corrected him, and he couldn’t really argue.
“Just don’t forget -” Jackson took his hand by the fingers and pulled it up in front of his eyes, forcing Holland to read what Jackson had written there in ball point pen half an hour ago at the bar. You are not invincible. Don’t do anything stupid.
Holland nodded as if it were a completely normal request, and pulled Jackson into a tight hug. Jackson buried his face for a quick second against Holland’s neck, quelling an urge to kiss him goodbye properly. He could have, he supposed, it wasn’t as if they would draw that much attention, but they both tended to be a little shy with PDAs. Their embarrassment often made Holly roll her eyes (‘get with the times, you guys!’ she’d say), but then, they weren’t young like she was, and while the world kept turning, eventually everyone stopped turning with it.
“Stay safe,” Jackson said against Holland’s neck.
“I will.”
“Call me if you even think there’s gonna be trouble.”
“You too,” Holland said, and let go.
They stayed, watched him board the plane, Holly waving morosely after him as he walked into the jetway tunnel. Jackson turned to leave then, but per Holly’s insistence he stopped, and instead they waited until Holland’s plane had pulled away and taken off, soaring up up up until it was a tiny speck in the clouds. Once it had finally vanished from view, Jackson turned to her. “You want to get some pizza for dinner?”
* * * * *
Holly was petulant for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. She hardly said a word on the drive home, and would only shrug when Jackson asked her what she wanted on her pizza, which would have been fine except that she then refused to eat it. “Come on, you like pepperoni,” he said, plopping the greasy cardboard box down on the coffee table, trying to hide his irritation with her. He popped the top off of his beer and sat down on the couch beside her. “I’ve seen you eat half a large all by yourself.”
She poked at the slice on her plate and looked at him distastefully. “I think I’m a vegetarian now,” she said.
“Then pick it off.”
She didn’t answer, just kept poking. Jackson took a breath and suppressed an inclination to tell her that, when he was a boy, he’d have been smacked into next week for refusing to eat good food. Instead, he said, “You know, your dad’s going to be just fine.”
“Don’t be retarded,” Holly said. “Dad’s never fine.”
“Don’t call your elders retarded,” Jackson countered, taking a pull off his beer. “It’s not ladylike.”
“You’re being sexist. I’m not ladylike, and I don’t have to be.”
He laughed a little at that and shook his head. “No, I guess you don’t. I’m not about to be the man who tries to make you.”
Holly loudly put her plate down on the coffee table and crossed her arms, glaring straight ahead at the TV, as if the cast of Happy Days had personally offended her.
“Hey, hey, all right, let’s not be like that,” Jackson said, trying to rescue the situation. “Holly? I’m sorry. Look, will you read my palm?” Holly had learned palm reading from one of her school friends the Friday before, and had been going around telling everyone their futures. Jackson wiped the condensation off on his jeans and held out his callused hand to her.
She frowned at him, though some of the acidity had gone out of her glare. “I already did last week, it hasn’t changed.”
“I forgot what it was. Go on, work your mysticism.”
After a second’s hesitation, she took his hand and regarded it seriously. “Your head line says that you’re a person who prefers action over thinking, and that your job will be more physical than intellectual.”
“I already know that. Do I have a long life line?”
Yup. And look at this.” She pointed to a crease high on his palm. “Your heart line starts out near the middle, kind of faint, and then gets stronger. See? That means you find your true love late in life.”
“That so?” Jackson smiled.
“Uh huh. You and dad are meant to be.” She grabbed his fingers and pulled his hand closer, laughing a little. “It doesn’t look like you have any children with him, though, sorry.”
“We’ve got you,” Jackson replied.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Well yeah, but I meant children for you, though, I’m not your kid.” Holly’s grin faded, and she went quiet and looked away. Jackson tried not to look stung. “What I meant was -”
“No, it’s okay,” Jackson said. He cleared his throat, and they went back to silently watching TV, while Holly continued to pick at her slice of pizza.
Happy Days ended, and The Waltons followed. Everyone in the house had lost their taste for that particular show, so Jackson switched off the set and announced that he was going to go research a case, which, at this hour, meant he was going to sit in the office, drink beer, and pretend to look things up until he got too drunk to care about pretense anymore and started reading car and nudie magazines.
“Don’t stay up too late,” he told Holly, who was already half way to her room, no doubt about to blare that awful noise she called music (“It’s Punk,” she’d told him once, or he thought that was what she’d said, though it was difficult to tell with his fingers shoved into his ears). She didn’t reply, so he gave up and, shaking his head, went to the spare room to get started.
* * * * *
The key to being a successful alcoholic, Jackson knew, was adapting a flexible strategy.
It wasn’t enough to say, “I’ll have just one and go home” the way Holland sometimes did - that wasn’t going to happen. People like them lacked working brakes, which was why Jackson disliked like midday drinking. Once he got started, he found it exceptionally hard, nigh impossible to stop. So he stuck to his plan:
He started with a shot - whiskey, vodka, whatever sounded best that night, it wasn’t important. What was important was that he felt it hit. Not the moment the booze hit his stomach, but the beat after, when the hot burn-kick started to fade, and turn light and good, and seep into someplace right at the core of him, like unlocking a door to his true self which spread outward, outward, outward. It was like catching a wave in the ocean, and Jackson couldn’t think of anything in the world that felt better.
After that, he usually tried to take it slow - no more than one every thirty minutes, if possible. Tried to stick to beer, which was bad for his fat gut, but better for his hangover. Tried to start as late as possible, to minimize quantity before falling asleep. Tried to stay out of trouble with the law, in fact stay home, avoid human contact, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
Tonight, however, Jackson was in a shit mood, which meant fuck the plan. After his double bourbon shot, he drank two beers quick and wished Holland were there. Starting a third - or was it a fifth? He’d had two with dinner - he chided himself for his pity party. This wasn’t about Holland’s absence, or Holly’s moodiness, or anything else besides his own patterns of unease. Experience had taught him that, while he could handle being alone, he could not stand it when people left.
Experience had taught him that he operated a lot smoother when he never got too close to people in the first place.
He sat on the little twin bed they kept in the office for reasons of plausible deniability about where Jackson slept if one of Holly’s little friends decided to go poking around. It grated, but attracting the attention of strangers was one thing, while suddenly finding out that Holly’s friends weren’t allowed to associate with her anymore would be something else entirely. He ran his hands through his hair. ‘Stop putting your bad feelings on the kid,’ he though to himself. ‘The thirteen year old girl out there is not responsible for your feelings.’
He thought, ‘I didn’t think like this when I was sober. I didn’t.’
He thought, ‘I was sober before I met Holland. Alone and sober and unhappy.’
By the start of his second six pack, Jackson had stopped thinking altogether, and about halfway through it, he fell asleep in the office. His sleep was dreamless and undisturbed until he woke up at 1:50 am to the sound of someone running a bath.
* * * * *
“Holly?” Jackson called softly as he crept toward the bathroom. “Holly? Are you okay?” He rapped his knuckles on the door. There was no answer. “Holly, I’m going to come in, but I wont look.” He put his hand like a visor to his eyes as he opened the door.
She was dressed, he saw through the cracks in his fingers, and so he removed his hand. The next thing he saw was that she was kneeling down outside of the tub, but with her head hanging over the side, hair dunked under the faucet. No wonder she hadn’t heard him. “Holly!” he called loudly, causing her to startle and bang the back of her head on the tub fixture.
“Ow! Owowow!” she cried, grabbing the back of her head with both hands. He ran to her and knelt by her side.
“Sorry!” He took ahold of her temples and looked through her wet hair for any bleeding, but found none. “Look at me,” he ordered her, and she did. Her eyes were glassy and her face flushed, but her pupils looked normal, and so he let her go. “What were you doing?”
“I threw up in my hair,” she said, her voice slightly raspy.
“In your sleep?”
“No. Just now. It got in my way.”
“When did you start getting sick?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t feel good all day.” She grasped for some toilet paper and blew her nose, moaning a little. “It came out my nose. I hate that. It burns.”
“When did you start throwing up?”
“Uh, I don’t know. An hour ago?”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“You were sleeping,” Holly said, her head drooping to the side of the tub.
“But why didn’t you wake me up?”
“You were drunk,” she answered. There was no accusation in her voice - she stated it like a simple fact of life, you were drunk and therefore useless to me, just like dad, just like always. Jackson reeled.
“I’m not drunk,” he replied, and instantly felt stupid for arguing with her. Holly, to her credit, didn’t argue back, but then, she always was the mature one in the house. Or perhaps she simply didn’t feel up to continuing the conversation. “You look like you have a fever.” She felt like it too, although it was difficult for Jackson to tell. Sobering up had a way of playing havoc with his own temperature. “Hang on.”
He was back in a moment with the thermometer. She placed it under her tongue, and they waited the required three minutes before he took it back from her, squinting at it. “I can’t read this without my glasses. Can you?”
She did, and her eyes went wide. “Whoa. No way that’s right.”
“What’s it say?”
“103.9.”
“Jesus.” Jackson took a deep breath. “So. Hospital time, right?”
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” Holly mumbled, collapsing against the cool side of the tub. "I'm too tired."
“I know. I’ll get our shoes, wait just a minute.” He came back a few minutes later, shoes and a blanket in tow. “Come on,” he said, wrapping her up in the blanket. “One, two, three,” and on three, he hefted her up into his arms and carried her out to his car.
“Should I drive?” she asked, and his stomach clenched.
“No.”
“What if I throw up in your car?” she mumbled, shoving her face against the window.
“I don’t care,” Jackson said, and took off toward the nearest hospital.