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Jack will reflect afterwards– in hindsight– it is pretty self aggrandizing for him to have compared it to the Batsignal.
But also, to be fair, that isn’t the whole pitch. It’s just the part he adds on to make Mikey smile.
—
“What’d you think, buddy?”
They’ve both been staring at it where it’s sitting at the coffee-maker end of Robby’s kitchen counter, tucked innocuously into the corner. It’s plastic and electric fucking green. Its cord is curled in a thick, plastic garland around the base like the coils of a snake.
“So… it’s a phone?” Mike sucks his lip into his mouth and starts chewing.
“Uh huh.”
It’s an expensive phone– for a dumb one at least– from a fancy website with very hip graphic design that Jack guessed was aimed at parents who put their kids through crunchy granola private schools.
Mikey’s eyes are on him.
“For me?” he asks.
“Yup.”
Jack had put in an order for it two months ago, after a scare with Mikey that had ended up with 1) Jack making an emergency wellness check at Robby’s in the middle of the night and 2) both him and Mikey in tears, wrapped in his grandma’s old quilt in the center of the carpet (okay– Jack felt kinda close to tears, at least. He just hated to see Mikey like this).
“Now you can call me whenever you want, okay?” he says. “And I’ll come over. Like the Batsignal.”
Mikey laughs, and Jack smiles back– he doesn’t need to be a telepath to know that laugh means ‘Uncle Jack definitely isn’t cool enough for that.’ That’s okay. Mikey doesn’t have to know that Jack really is like Batman sometimes, showing up in the middle of a dayshift gone haywire, taking care of business, and vanishing just as quickly. Or at least, Frank had called him that once, and Jack had rolled with it, because fuck it, he felt cool sometimes.
The phone technically works over wifi, but Jack pays for the extra plan that lets you connect actual phone numbers to it. Not that Mikey (or Robby) needs to know any of that. Jack’s taken care of the bill and attached it to his own provider.
“Can I use it now?” Mikey asks.
“I mean, if you want to? I’m already h– woah–”
Mikey’s holding the receiver to his ear, having punched in a number into the big-buttoned keypad in lightning-fast strokes.
The phone makes a few electronic sounding chirps, though nothing resembling a dial tone.
“Mom?” Mikey asks, after a few seconds, and Jack feels his heart break into a million pieces.
He snatches the phone, Mikey squawking indignantly. Jack jams the receiver back in the cradle.
“Why’d you do that?” Mikey whines.
“Listen, sweetheart. I know you wanna talk to her. But— the phone isn’t gonna work. You can’t call that number, okay?”
“Why not?”
After deliberating for a moment, Jack decides to be honest. “It only calls numbers I let it call.”
“What?”
“Like–” Jack tries to find the words that would make sense to someone with an elementary school education in 1979– “pre, uh, programmed.”
“So, I can only call that number?” Mikey jabs a finger at the sticky note Jack had scrawled his cell number on, stuck to the backsplash above the phone with UNCLE JACK : ) written next to it in his chickenscratch. That’ll fuck with Robby a little, for sure. He figures Mikey gets the gist, though.
Jack can tell he’s starting to get upset. The short breaths, the tense shoulders.
“Yeah, Mikey,” he answers. “Is that a problem?”
“Fuck you.”
“Excuse me?” Jack’s mouth has gone dry.
Mikey twists, like he’s about to walk away, but Jack grabs him by the bicep, steers him back.
“No, no. What did you just say, Mikey?”
Mikey, the little shit, jerks his arm, and Jack watches as he uses the other one to shove the phone clear off the counter, catching some of the tiny fancy espresso cups Robby keeps next to the machine as casualties on the way. The phone clatters to the ground; ceramic shatters everywhere. They both jump.
“You okay?” Jack asks, reflexively, even while pissed. Because he’s definitely getting pissed.
Mikey’s eyes are wide for a second, tense as a startled cat, until he shakes his head. Mouths the words again, like he knows he shouldn’t say them. Fuck. You. His face is openly, self-righteously fearsome– so different from an angry Robby, but also the same. Like the face Robby would make if he wasn’t always so busy looking away or rubbing the back of his neck or getting his hands busy fixing whatever had been fucked up. It’s like looking directly at the sun.
“Mikey–”
“I don’t want to call you. I want to call my mom,” he spits, bratty. Robby-sounding enough that it has Jack skipping right over the sympathy.
By his side, he clenches his fist, unclenches it.
Mikey probably comes from an age where it was acceptable, expected, even, to get a few licks for being a shithead. He can remember his own dad giving him and his brother a hiding once or twice for things Jack can’t recall but probably deserved it for. But the thought of putting Mikey over his lap like that feels very— like something that feels like it probably shouldn’t, Jack decides. He can feel his face turning red for like five different reasons. What is he thinking?
“Go stand over there,” he barks, pointing to the other side of the kitchen, which is still relatively unscathed by the scattered arc of broken ceramic. “Get out of my way, I need to clean this up.”
Mikey stares at him.
“Go!”
“Hmph.”
“Be careful,” he says, before he can stop himself, watching as Mikey stomps away on socked feet and goes over to flop himself down on the couch.
Jack knows where all the stuff is to clean up, so he grabs it, then sets to work. He tries to focus hard on the physical actions: sweeping, dumping out the dustpan, vacuuming up with an elegant cordless vacuum that Jack can’t believe Robby would have ever bought for himself— must have been Janey. When he picks up the phone off the linoleum, checking it over, there isn’t so much as a dent. Go figure. He sets it back on the counter.
With nothing else left to fuss about, he sighs, and heads towards trouble.
“Say you’re sorry, Mikey.” It’s not so much a command as a plea.
Mikey’s sitting sullenly on the couch, arms wrapped around himself, chin tucked to chest. Jack can practically see the sulking, malevolent aura streaming from him like heat off tarmac. Trying to get in there and break open Mikey’s bad mood seems like trying to break into Fort Knox, and Jack can still feel his own pissed off-ness like hot steam in his chest. He doesn’t want to do something he regrets.
So he does the only thing he can think of.
“Okay. Uncle Jack’s gonna have some alone time, now, I think.”
Mikey’s eyes flick up to him but he doesn’t say anything.
“Not leaving,” Jack emphasizes. “Just need some quiet time by myself.”
Mikey grunts in a way that Jack interprets as ‘whatever.’
Alright, then.
Jack briskly checks over the apartment with a quick, tactical once-over to make sure the stove isn’t on, or something– nothing Mikey could accidentally kill himself or Jack with, unwittingly– before he heads towards the bedroom door.
“Be out in a little bit,” he says, over his shoulder. He wants to add ‘be good,’ but they’re both in a mood and that feels like a bad call right now.
Silence.
He closes the door behind him and, after a beat, locks it. The room is strangely quiet and still. Cold, almost.
He goes and throws himself rather dramatically on Robby’s bed, face down, leg throbbing to suddenly have weight off it. Half of him wants to shout into the pillows, but Mikey would hear that, and that’s not the point of this exercise. He settles for breathing into them hotly for a couple of minutes, instead, deep, forceful breaths.
It doesn’t really help; the bedding all smells like Robby and basically straight huffing it is just making him feel even worse, weird and riled up, sort of awkwardly horny. He flips over on his back. Pulls his phone out of his pocket, trying for something to do to keep himself distracted from the looming realization that he’s just left Mikey alone by himself in the rest of the condo.
He’s gotten a new text from Frank Langdon, of all people. He opens their thread immediately, and for a second everything else going on in his head subsides while he scrolls. Their last conversation had been logistics from when Frank had done a run of working nights as an R2. Below the mouldy old texts is a fresh one:
Hey Jack
hey frank, he texts back.
Jack watches as the gray typing bubbles pop up immediately. Frank’s response comes in only a few seconds:
Would you be around for coffee or something next week? I’d like to talk.
Jack hears footsteps outside and looks up from his phone to stare at the door, the words ‘I’d like to talk’ still ping ponging outside his head disquietingly. His heart is beating pretty hard, he realizes distantly.
“Uncle Jack?” Mikey’s voice says, muffled.
“Yeah, kid?”
“You gonna come out now?” Mikey’s tone sounds– it’s hard to tell, a little distorted. But it sounds annoyed. Like Uncle Jack is a frustrating pet, a bad dog. Jack feels annoyed right back. Prickly.
“Not yet. Gimme a minute, okay?”
More silence. He looks back at his phone, trying to hack back through his memories of what could possibly be going wrong. He comes up with nothing more specific than ‘Frank’s having trouble since coming back from rehab.’
sure. sup, he types.
Mikey’s knocking on the door, now, rapid thuds. “C’mon,” he’s whining. “Please?” The knob jiggles. What a little shit!
“Leave it, buddy,” Jack warns. His phone buzzes with another text from Frank:
It’s better if I just explain in person.
Normally he’d let that be, go with the flow, but Jack really isn’t in the mood. Something about this whole conversation is putting him ill at ease and he can’t handle any more on his plate right now.
He responds with a single question mark.
Please Jack.
Jack stares at the text. Mikey’s still talking at him, saying something about how Jack’s been in there long enough and it’s time for him to come out. Jack thinks he hears the word pussy tossed in there, and ignores it, because it’s better if pretends he didn’t.
im fine to meet but throw me a bone here Frank, he sends, quickly.
It’s about Robby.
Jack realizes he’s run into a wall in this conversation like Wile-E-Coyote at the exact moment something bigger hits the frame than just Mikey’s fist. Jack jumps.
“Come out!” Mikey’s voice sounds upset, again, the jadedness flaked right off. What the fuck?
“Stop it, now, Mikey,” Jack commands, knee-jerk.
He hears another blow hit the door and, god damn it, Robby is gonna wake up tomorrow morning with a sore shoulder and a busted doorframe and no idea what happened, at this rate. That’s when some small, vindictive voice inside Jack says, good. So what if Robby is a little caught off guard. Jack has come over and taken care of Mikey… he tries to count backwards over the last few months. A dozen times? More? It’s starting to feel like Robby needs him to drop everything and stay the night every other weekend. Almost like they’re– the words going out comes to mind, in some twisted way, but he skips over them.
The other corner of his brain, lurking in the dark in the back, is wondering if there’s really anything so exciting about the rest of Jack’s life he’d rather be doing that instead– hell, he’s asked Linda, the coordinator for his TEMS unit, to take him off the roster for the next quarter– but he ignores that, too.
“Uncle Jack!”
Mikey’s voice is plaintive. There are a few more blows. Jack lays there, frozen on the bed, half-ready to jump up, rip open the door and wrestle Mikey to the ground, modern ideas about corporeal punishment be damned, when the slamming tapers off. Then stops.
“Mikey?”
No response.
His phone buzzes again:
Please. Just thirty minutes.
Jack thinks of Frank saying that to him in person. It’s easy to imagine how he’d look. Frank’s handsome, open face, the insane blue eyes, the arms crossed over his chest in the way he’d only started doing since he came back from rehab, forearms and watch. He’d gotten more defensive under Robby’s nonstop cold shoulder. Cagier.
of course, Jack responds. where and when?
In the quiet, they quickly hash out the logistics. They decide on some little coffee place next Tuesday morning, threaded between their shifts— not one of the usual haunts near PTMC, but one another neighborhood over. Frank doesn’t want somebody accidentally stumbling across this conversation, and Jack doesn’t blame him.
Faintly, while he’s texting, Jack hears a sob. Fuck. Wet cries that sound like they’re coming from the living room. They keep going. After Frank sends the final thumbs up emoji, plans squared, Jack throws his phone aside and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. Jesus Christ, is this what it’s like to be a new parent trying to cry out their baby in the middle of the night?? It’s fucking torture.
He presses on his eyes until he sees blood-hot stars. Robby reaching for Jack on the couch, that first time, himself again like nothing had ever happened. Mikey mouthing fuck you over and over.
Jack grinds his teeth.
Full silence.
For a minute, Jack is thankful. Finally, sweet relief. Now he can try and talk his anger down from the edge, ruminate on Frank’s weird-ass concerning text messages in peace. Yay, him.
As the silence creeps on and on, he can feel fear take root in his stomach. A car drives by outside, headlights swinging across the ceiling. The switch flips. Everything suddenly looks different, in this light. He left Mikey alone. Alone with Robby inside him. Robby, who is unreliably self-preserving on the best of days, who’s capable of—
“I’m coming out, now, buddy.”
The hall is silent as he limps slightly down it. The light is still on in the living room but the couch is conspicuously empty, though Jack notices that some of Robby’s stuff has been scattered on the carpet. Records he never listens to, mostly. An upended pile of books that Robby had never bothered to put onto shelves. Nobody’s fussing around in the kitchen.
“Mikey?”
Before he fully panics, Jack circles back around and checks the guest bathroom and bedrooms, starting to lean heavily on his leg. Acts reasonably. Then unreasonably, when he opens the closet, just in case— even though he knows it’s stupid. Nothing in there but a bunch of bare hangers and some old clothes Robby’s had in vacuum sealed bags since 2018, probably. Something about that makes Jack so goddamn sad. He spins on his heel and heads back to the living room.
“Mikey, where are you?” he calls again. His heart, which is knocking insistently at the base of his throat, creeps higher. Mikey is, apparently, nowhere. He grabs the bag he’d left slouched against the side of the couch while mentally cataloging everything in it— his typical light prep fare of a multi-tool, lighter, and a postcard-sized first aid kit (pre-assembled, but fucked with to include what he likes in there)— and mapping out Robby’s neighborhood. He retroactively times the silence like a seizure and keeps it running. How far could he have gotten in three, four minutes? Imagining Mikey wandering the streets of Squirrel Hill alone, jilted and terrified, makes Jack feel sick. He doesn’t want Mikey out in the world. Robby doesn’t want Mikey out in the world.
And nobody’s responsible for this whole cluster but Jack.
While he’s rifling through his bag, checking to see if he has anything that could help him unfuck this situation at all, he notices a gap in the floor length curtains that lead out to the— his stomach does a little flip.
The balcony.
Robby is on the third floor. And to some part of Jack, that had always been a comfort. That the third floor wasn’t… enough. It’s tiny, caged in by wrought iron, hardly big enough for the two dead potted plants Robby’s had out there for ages. For a long time Robby had just gone out there to have the occasional smoke, on a bad night, and Jack had tagged along with him, just to be a pal. Eventually that had turned into Robby letting Jack have a few puffs, swapped back and forth. And eventually that had turned into Jack having a smoke of his own after Robby had gone to sleep, either passed out on the couch after a game or passed out in bed after sex, like some kind of cliche post-coital cigarette. It was easy enough to find where Robby kept his smokes (junk drawer second down from the top next to the fridge), and he never complained about any going missing.
The idea of Mikey on the balcony is terrifying enough that Jack feels his secondary brain kick in, the one that steps up to deal when shit gets really fucked. Terminator Mode. His therapist had laughed when he told him what he called it.
Jack bursts through the glass sliding door, ready for anything.
“Mikey?”
What he finds is a figure wrapped up in the old quilt, leaned up against one of the railings. They’re looking up at something in the sky. When Jack looks, later, he’ll see the stars out there, too, bright and surprisingly clear. But for right now, he’s too busy to look up.
Mikey-Robby doesn’t even turn around when Jack steps out onto the concrete pad.
“You scared me,” Jack says, arms by his sides. He still doesn’t know what he’s ready for.
Robby– or Jack thinks it could be Robby, until he wipes his nose with the back of his hand in a way that is just too damn non-self aware for him to be anyone but Mikey– looks over at him.
“You scared me so bad,” Jack repeats. “I didn’t know you were out here.”
Mikey just blinks at him.
“I thought you left, man. I didn’t know where you were,” Jack presses. “I didn’t know if you got hurt.”
“Sorry,” says Mikey, voice wet with old tears. He doesn’t really sound that sorry, but whatever, it’s as good as they’re gonna get.
“It’s okay. I’m sorry I left you alone, buddy.”
“I didn’t like it.”
“Me, neither.”
“Don’t do that again.”
“I won’t.”
“You promise?”
“I promise, I won’t. Really.”
“Okay.” Mikey looks suspicious in a very adult way. Jack hates everything.
“Can I–” he asks, moving closer already, anyways.
Mikey’s form slackens, a little, as Jack finds a way to worm under the quilt. Jack sees why Mikey loves this thing. Feels like you could survive a whole firefight in here without a scratch, thick and dark and mothball-y. Jack makes sure one hand is snaked around Mikey’s back, firmly wrapped around the balcony’s railing so Mikey’s safety-belted against it. Can never, ever be too careful, he knows, not even for a second, and curses himself for being terrible. He feels Mikey sag closer under his arm, despite himself, leaning into his shitty uncle who’s fucking all kinds of stuff up real bad. He’s so sweet. Jack sighs.
“I know you wanna call your mom, honey. But you can’t. I wish you could.”
“Why not?”
“Michael.”
Uncle Jack has never called Mikey Michael. Mikey startles a little, stands up straighter, twisting in Jack’s arms to look him in the face. Jack wonders who else used to call Robby that, and when.
“I need you to trust me on this one,” he continues. “Do you trust me?”
He can actively see Mikey work this one over for a second before he gives a hesitant nod, which makes Jack feel a bit better. First, because that means he hasn’t fucked this all up beyond recognition. Second, because Mikey has never been just some dumb kid. That’s the chief attending to the PTMC in there.
“You just can’t. She’s just too far away. It won’t work. On that phone or,” he weighs the words. “Any phone.”
Mikey’s real quiet. Jack can still hear the snot from the tantrum earlier in his breathing.
“I’m sorry,” Jack mutters, pressing a kiss into the side of his head, because he really is sorry.
Mikey watches the street for a while. Jack isn’t so stoked that he’s looking down over the edge of the balcony, now. He prefers him looking up at the stars. He shifts closer, holds Mikey tighter.
“I kind of guessed that,” Mikey says eventually in his small, precise voice, and if that isn’t the most heartbreaking thing. Jack feels the weight of his phone in his back pocket buzz with another notification, very distantly, and ignores it completely. He presses another kiss to Mikey’s temple.
“Guess we’re just a couple of weirdos, you and I, huh?” he says, eventually.
“I already knew that,” Mikey agrees. He’s tipped his chin up, now, though, eyes scanning for something.
—
Four days later, Jack’s peeling off a double and in the middle of handing off to Shen when his phone starts ringing on silent in his pocket. Shen’s literally double-fisting coffees to make up for the day shift, poor bastard.
Robby had called in some time last night, according to Dana.
“Put at least one of those down, man,” Jack grouses, waiting until Shen puts one of the sweating cups on the chest-high charge desk so he can take the tablet Jack is passing off. Shen mumbles something unintelligible.
The contact in Jack’s phone screen reads: Buddy. Jack’s heart is immediately in his throat. He picks up.
“Everything okay?” he asks, before anyone can so much as say ‘hello,’ which is stupid.
“Uncle Jack?” Damn if it isn’t Mikey’s voice coming out of his phone speaker, directly into his ear. Something in Jack can’t help but marvel at that even as he's feeling frazzled, anxious– excited?
“Yeah, it’s me. What’s up?”
“Can you, um.”
Jack, who has been going nonstop for the last twenty plus hours, who has hardly had time to piss or eat, waits. He tries to listen closely, like he can hear Mikey breathing uncertainly on the other side if he does.
“Can you come over?”
There’s something helplessly endearing about hearing Mikey actually ask for it, himself. Not just popping out after a game-night half-nap like Robby’s ghost. Mikey actually used the goddamn phone to call Jack for help. He used it. The satisfaction of that– of the image of Mikey with that insanely green phone to his ear, curled over the counter, maybe playing with the cord– hits Jack hard in the chest while he answers:
“Of course. I’ll be there in thirty. Hang tight for me?”
“I guess.”
“C’mon, you can do it.”
“Get here fast.”
“Batsignal, baby. I told ya.”
The sound of Mikey’s annoyed huff is warming enough that Jack doesn’t even give a shit that Shen is looking at him weird once he hangs up and slips his phone back in his pocket, ready to end this shift, get in his Jeep, and roll out like the smiling idiot he is, heart towards the highway.