Chapter Text
Mike wished there was one moment he could point at, when the decision to leave tipped from idle fantasy to an inevitability.
Instead there’s just a slow grinding fracture between him and the family that should have been his.
“You did this, you know,” their father said one night over dinner a few months after the diagnosis.
Bobby was in his room, even then too ill to eat at the table most of the time. Jack sat at one end of the table, Eleanor the other, Mike and John trapped between them.
At their father’s words, Eleanor placed her silverware down, and folded her hands in her lap. She stared down the table at her husband, gaze outwardly placid, but attention razor sharp.
“Michael, you and John are excused. Go help him with his homework,” she said.
“No,” Jack said idly, twirling the drink in his hand. “They should hear.”
Eleanor glanced at Mike. “Go, záy-ka,” she said softly.
Jack slammed his tumbler into the table.
It shattered, and glass exploded outward. Before he knew it, Mike was half out of his seat, moving towards John. John had made it even further, almost all the way under the table before Jack’s bloodied hand caught his collar and dragged him back into his seat.
“Sit down,” he said mildly. He used his free hand to point at Eleanor. “You speak English in my house.”
John breathed loud and fast. His eyes so wide that the whites around his pupil were fully visible. He’d frozen, caught, like an animal in a trap.
Jack’s gaze swept over the table. “Sit down,” he said again.
Mike forced himself to sit, hands clenched on the armrests of his chair. Down at her end of the table, Eleanor did the same. Mike glanced at her, and saw that her eyes were wide too, darting between Jack’s face and where Jack’s hand was clenched into a bloody fist in John’s shirt collar.
She was breathing hard too, almost as hard as John.
But her face was blank, no outward sign of her obvious terror in her expression.
The moment hung, blood-tinged, and terrible.
“Okay, Jack,” Eleanor said calmly. “What do you have to say?”
Jack sighed and glanced at Mike. “Pour me another drink.”
Mike hesitated, and turned his head to look at his mother. Jack tsked sharply.
“Don’t look at her. Pour me another drink. Go.”
Mike slowly got to his feet, the sound of his chair’s legs scraping against the floor very loud in the sudden silence. He reluctantly turned his back long enough to go to the sidebar, pick up another crystal tumbler and fill it with whiskey from the matching decanter. He turned back and set it by Jack’s elbow.
“May we go?” he asked, eyes on where Jack still held John’s shirt collar in his bloody hand.
“No,” Jack said, idly. “Sit.”
Mike retook his seat and wrapped his shaking hands back around the armrests.
Jack took a long drink with his free hand, and then placed the tumbler back on the table with a gentle thud.
“You should know that your mother comes from a weak stock. Weak blood,” Jack said.
“The reason we’re here is because of you,” Jack added, stabbing a finger at Mike. “And your bitch of a mother getting pregnant when she damn well knew better.”
“If I’d had my choice I would have married a proper woman, who would have given me proper, strong children. Instead I have you,” he said to Mike. “And it’s too late to fix you.”
“Your mother’s weakness is what’s going to kill your brother,” Jack said.
Eleanor made a faint sound of protest.
“You,” he said to John, ”are the only one I have left.” He shook John, once, harsh, a predator throating prey. “You will not be weak. Do you understand?”
John stared up at him, his eyes huge, his little chest rising and falling jack-rabbit fast. Jack’s hand unclenched from John’s shirt collar and gripped John’s jaw, smearing his blood across John’s lips and chin.
“Do you understand?” Jack asked again.
“He understands,” Mike quickly, loudly, his eyes on his father’s hand on John’s face. “Johnny, you understand?”
John finally nodded, his eyes filling with tears.
“I do! I understand! I understand—.”
“Good,” Jack interrupted. He gently pulled his hand away. “Get out.”
Mike jumped to his feet, scrambled around the table and scooped John into his arms. He looked back once as he passed through the French doors and saw his mother and father still seated at either end of the table, staring at each other.
John was sobbing in earnest now, his face pressed to Mike’s shoulder. Mike took the stairs two at a time, threw himself into his bedroom, slamming the door closed behind him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
John just screwed his eyes shut and wailed.
Mike paced, squeezing John to his chest, bouncing him the way that he’d seen Eleanor bounce Bobby, bounce John.
“Shh,” Mike hushed. “John, you need to be quiet. Be quiet now.”
John kept sobbing, and Mike felt the shirt near his shoulder soak through. Mike clenched his teeth, keeping as much of his attention on the door as he could.
“John,” he said. “Johnny, you need to be quiet. Please, please stop crying. You’re safe.”
John wailed again, and Mike felt something in him snap.
He drew back, grabbed one of John’s tiny shoulders and shook him.
“Shut up!” he shouted in John’s face. “You need to shut the fuck up or he’s going to come in here! Shut up!”
John hiccuped, his face red and covered in tears and snot. He stopped sobbing and started hyperventilating. It was quieter, at least.
“Shit. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Johnny. Shh. I’m sorry.”
He sat down on his bed, still facing the door, and pressed his littlest brother to his chest. Eventually John’s breathing calmed. Mike pulled back, tugged his shirtsleeve down, and wiped it through the mess of tears, snot and their father’s blood on John’s tiny face.
“It’s okay,” he said, as calmly as he could. “I’m sorry I yelled.”
“Mikey,” John said, his voice wobbling.
He stopped, sucked in a deep breath, and held it for a second. Doing what Mike had asked. Shutting up.
“Mikey,” he said. “I’m sorry. I won’t be weak. I promise.”
A few tears escaped, but no more sobbing. “Tell father? I’m not weak.”
Mike stared at him, a smear of Jack’s blood caught in the crease of one of his nostrils.
“I know you’re not,” Mike said. “I’ll tell him.”
It was the first crack. The first of many.
Bobby was exempt from their father’s temper, not out of deference for his illness but due to pure disinterest on Jack’s part. Bobby would die, so he might as well already be dead. Mike shielded John as much as he could, and John became even better at making himself scarce. But sometimes Jack caught John on his own.
John would find Mike after, hollow-eyed. Sometimes, but decreasingly tear-stained. Sometimes with hand-shaped bruises, but often not. Mike knew very well that Jack didn’t need his fists when words did just fine.
“I’m sorry,” Mike would say, and he’d wrap John in a hug.
But as the years passed, and Bobby became more and more ill, John sought him out less and less. With the gift of hindsight, Mike could see that it was partially Jack winning the fight for John’s soul, isolating the kid from the ‘weak’ influences in his life, his mother and brothers.
It’s only years and years and hundreds of miles away from it all that Mike could see that he’d been angry, not at Jack for being an abusive piece-of-shit, but at John for supplanting Mike in their family’s eyes.
But he didn’t know that then. All he knew was that he was pissed off almost all the time, and there was little to nothing that anyone could do to knock him out of it.
The one exception seemed to be their Bábu, who became more and more of a safe haven as Mike got older. She didn’t know everything because Mike was careful with what he chose to reveal, but she knew enough.
“Nothing stays the same, rad-nóy,” she would say. “All things end, even this.”
And that would help for a little bit, because it meant that as terrible as this all was, it had to end eventually.
A few nights after Bobby’s funeral, when the house was quiet, Mike knocked on his mother’s closed door and whispered, “It’s Mike.”
A moment later he heard the door unlock, and it opened to Eleanor’s wan face.
“Mikey,” she said, also whispering. “What’s wrong?”
She opened the door wider and ushered him inside, closing and locking it behind him. Mike glanced around, half expecting her room to be in the same state as his, things half packed. But it wasn’t. Her room was immaculate. No bags. Her things set out where they’d always been.
“Aren’t we…” he trailed off, confused. “When are we leaving?”
Eleanor frowned, and moved past him, sitting down in her armchair with a soft, tired-sounding sigh.
“Leaving?”
Mike took a slow breath. “Bobby’s gone,” he said, and his voice only broke a little. “We don’t have to stay here now. We can go.”
Eleanor stared up at him, the confusion melting away and leaving behind something that looked very sad.
And resigned.
“Michael,” she sighed. “Záy-ka, come here.”
Mike sat on the ottoman by her feet, and she immediately reached out and placed her hand along his jaw.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry that things are…the way they are. I would fix it if I could. You know that, right?”
Mike stared up at her, a pit growing in his stomach. “We can leave.”
“Where would we go?”
“To Bábu,” Mike said, trying to stay calm. “To anywhere. I’ll get a job. We’ll take John, and just go.”
He wrapped his hand around her wrist. “Mom. We can’t stay here.”
Eleanor raised her other hand, and cradled Mike’s face between her palms.
“Michael,” she said, but Mike was already shaking his head, the pit in his stomach growing wider and deeper.
“Michael,” she said again. “You’re almost an adult now, so I’m going to be honest with you.”
Mike kept shaking his head, and tried to pull away. Her grip tightened, and she forced him to meet her gaze.
“Your father is never going to let John go, do you understand? And we can’t leave him.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Mike said, his voice rising. “He’s just an asshole. Mom, mom, we can go. Let’s just go. Please.”
“We can’t.”
“Yes we can. We can. Please, Mom. I can take care of you and John. I promise. Please!”
Eleanor hushed him, and drew him into a hug, pressing his face to her shoulder. Mike didn’t cry, because the yawning pit in him swallowed everything, even that.
He didn’t cry then. He didn’t cry once, not when Eleanor collapsed and was hospitalized about a year later. Not when Bábu found him and John in the waiting room, took one of John’s hands and one of Mike’s hands in each of hers, and told them that their mom was dead.
That she was gone.
Bábu cried. She cried. And she prayed in a mix of Russian and Yiddish. She looked at him and looked at John and saw that they weren’t crying and cried harder for them.
The night after Eleanor’s funeral, Bábu looked at all of them. At Gamma, and Jack and Mike and John and their still, dry faces and she cried.
“You’re a monster,” she said to Jack. “You killed my daughter.”
She looked at John and Mike, and her expression somehow crumpled even further.
“You killed her boys. You killed their souls.”
The words clung.
And one day, a few weeks after Mike’s uncelebrated eighteenth birthday, he rolled out of bed and packed a bag.
Less than an hour later, Mike was easing his bedroom door closed for the last time. He made his way to the stairs, but paused at John’s closed door.
He slowly placed his bag down, breathed, knocked on the door and said, “It’s Mike.”
A moment later he heard the door unlock, and John’s serious little face peeked out at him.
“Hey kid,” Mike said. “Let me in.”
John moved out of the way, standing almost at attention at the foot of his bed as Mike closed the door, habitually locking it behind them.
He sat on John’s bed.
“Come here,” he said, and patted the space on the bed next to him.
John sat, and he had to hop a little, he was still so short.
Ten. He was just ten years old.
John sat and stared down at where his fingers tangled together in his lap.
The silence settled, and they existed in it for a while, John frowning down at his hands, Mike staring at John’s face, committing it to memory.
“You know I love you, right? Even if I’m not here?”
“I know that,” John said. He took a deep breath, and finally looked up at him. “I’m your brother.”
He said the words like they mattered, and Mike felt himself softening. “Yeah, kid.”
“I’ll still be your brother, even if you leave?”
Before Mike knew it, he was crying, because Bábu was wrong; Jack had not killed him. Both of them were still alive, still whole. And Mike was leaving his brother here. He reached out and wrapped his arms around John, and he cried, because his mother had asked for one thing.
But if he did it, if he stayed, it would kill his soul, and it was the one thing that he had left.
“I would take you with me if I could," he said. "You know that, right?”
John looked a little dubious at that, and he examined Mike’s tears like he didn’t quite understand them, but he said, “I know.”
Eventually, Mike let him go, pressing one last kiss to the top of his head. “Don’t let him kill you. You’re so much stronger than him. Do you understand? You have to be strong.”
John sighed. “Okay.”
He finally hugged Mike back. “I love you, Mikey.”
“I love you too, kid.”