Endgame
Written by Tears of Mercury
A/N: I hope you guys enjoy. Just a little one-shot on how JT's death affects five different people.
Ashley knows that she should be thrilled. Ellie's article has made it to the front page; a huge deal not only because it has nothing to do with the university but because Ellie is a freshman, as her boyfriend and editor loves to remind her. It's good writing, too. It almost shocks her to see how her best friend in the world has crafted a body of five hundred words so carefully, paid tribute to JT's death in a way more beautiful than any song of Ashley's ever could have. Instead of calling Ellie up right away and then proceeding to frame the article for kicks, she glances down at the only quote of hers that Ellie included. What if it had been Jimmy?
The two of them have been through plenty this year. Between getting to know each other again, dealing with Jimmy's two very different identity crises, and struggling to comfort each other when her step brother's best friend died, there's hardly been time to breathe. Somehow they've managed to come out stronger than ever, a first for their relationship. But if the shooting had taken place this year instead of during grade eleven…
Although she would never dream of saying it out loud, Ashley isn't sure how she would have held up had she been in Hazel's position three years ago. At his best, Jimmy is prideful and stoic in crisis. At her worst, Ashley becomes clingy and overbearing and hypersensitive to things that don't faze normal people. The combination would have been horrible.
Now, though, Jimmy's cockiness has been replaced by an easy confidence that allows him to wheel Ashley around on his lap and ignore the stares that her loud laughter earns them. Ashley isn't as fragile as she used to be. When she hurts she doesn't hide behind layers of black clothing and angry songs and temper tantrums, she lets it show. And, she notes with near disbelief, she's finally developed a sense of humor. Somehow they'd had to be broken and recover individually to be strong together. Without basketball to define him, Jimmy had to learn to like himself instead of finding satisfaction in his talent for a sports game or his smoothness with women (which he still has, in her opinion). If Jimmy was to start walking or Ashley was suddenly diagnosed with a terminal illness, the core factor of their relationship wouldn't change or alter. So in some small way, she can see the bad that they've gone through as something more than meaningless and the universe as something more than a collection of black holes punctuated by stars and planets.
If it had been Jimmy, she might have mourned for much longer than was healthy. She may have taken flight to England again and written songs too shallow and dishonest in their grief to be deep, or she might have sought Craig out and found comfort in the remnants of a relationship she may never understand. But eventually, she would recover. She would go to New York and get her degree in law and start dating again, because Jimmy wouldn't want it any other way. In a comforting paradox, Jimmy is what gives her the strength that she needs to stand on her own two feet.
With this thought in mind, she fastens the pendant he gave her on their one month anniversary around her neck and slips into a flowing skirt and a pair of high heels. Like always, he arrives about thirty seconds early. Yes, she decides, I could live without him. But looking into his face and seeing a love and desire that makes her heart race, she realizes that she wouldn't want to.
-0-0-0-
Two deaths on her hands. Emma runs her fingers through her hair, trying to keep her eyes focused on the front of the classroom. All motivation to keep this year's average at 4.0 left with JT. A small hand closes around hers, and when Emma glances to the desk beside her, she notices Manny fighting back tears. It's not something that most people could recognize, not even those that have known Manuella Santos for years: her ebony eyes appear almost emotionless, and her lips are relaxed into a full, straight line; they usually quiver when she cries. As her best friend, it's Emma's job to recognize the signs, though, and the slight shake in Manny's hand along with the way her jaw muscle flexes and her eyebrows are furled ever so slightly tells her that something's wrong. When the teacher walks out of the classroom to find the misplaced overhead projector, she reaches over and gently pushes Manny's head onto her shoulder.
"I don't know what I'd do without you, Emma," Manny says fearfully. Carefully, as if even suggesting such a thing might bring it about. She doesn't know how to tell her friend that things would probably take a turn for the better if she wasn't around.
A secret that she's never told anyone, not even Sean, plagues her sometimes. If she hadn't gotten there in time that day, any harm that might have come to Spike or Jack would have been her fault. It's not as cold and unchanging as her guilt over Rick or her responsibility for hosting the party that resulted in JT's death. Because it's something that never happened, the millions of possibilities and the millions of ways that things could have been her fault never quite settle into one concrete pattern. She couldn't listen. She looked her mother in the eye and as much as told her that all she had to give wasn't good enough. And Snake, oh god, Snake, the one father that she would always have – she had said something cruel and awful in the heat of the moment when she knew how it would affect him; she wanted it to affect him that way. A poison that had never killed any of them but had rotted away at the foundation of their family – maybe that is why, to her at least, it was an act of murder.
JT was her best friend. Before she caught sight of Manny across the sandbox, JT's grandmother had been sharing parenting tips with her mother and their diaper bags had seemed almost interchangeable. In preschool, he asked her to marry him. She said no. By grade two, Emma had developed a crush on him, but he was much too oblivious to take notice. They made a mutual agreement in grade four to always remain friends, but if he didn't end up marrying their teacher and Superman never returned her affections, they would fall back on each other. This, of course, was before Sean and Manny and Liberty and a smattering of other second tier love interests had broken onto the scene. Had she ever loved him? No, she decides, she hadn't. It had been a nice, harmless fantasy, though, one that had survived so many of the other events to steal their innocence.
Liberty isn't in class today. Lately her robotic motions have come to an abrupt halt, and her tears, anger, and small, sad smiles have all been more genuine. There's a certain brokenness, Emma muses, that some people need in them to feel things to the core. It's always the ones who are overly emotional who bounce back. After the shooting, you could hardly see the marks on Manny or JT (not that they had that many to boast of in the first place), and although it had taken a span of months, Toby had slowly and painfully recovered. It was Emma, only Emma, who had been ripped apart completely. She wonders which version of her is the lesser of two evils: the cool, composed Emma or the stranger that does reckless things like give attached boys blow jobs and starves herself for days on end, just to feel the wonderful sensation of lightness and the triumph of one, two, three disappearing pounds. She had finally reached a happy medium. Now she is emotionless, reactive instead of active, all over again.
The bell rings, and when Manny asks her with concern where it is that she's going, she explains that she needs to get away for awhile and that Sean gave her a copy of the key to his wasteland of an apartment. She doesn't offer and invitation, but Manny looks content to stay where she is. As she pulls up in front of the sagging building and walks the littered hallway, she remembers the night after JT's memorial service when she and Sean almost made love on the creaky, uncomfortable bed that was shoved in the corner of his cracker box bedroom. He had paused her advances gently, holding her when she sobbed. The key turns in the bolt and the door opens to an empty apartment. The irrational hope that she has been carrying that he will magically be there, knowing that she needs him more than anything, dissolves completely.
She kicks off her shoes and settles into the futon situated five feet from the thirteen-inch TV held up by a cardboard box. As she switches through the handful of channels that come in, the sudden urge for double cheese pizza hits her. She hasn't had a craving for food of any kind in as long as she can remember. With a start she realizes that her purse is back in her locker. The money that Sean keeps hidden in his dresser drawer is only for emergencies (is he planning on fleeing the country suddenly?), and with none of her own she is out of options, defeated by a problem so silly that it's hardly a problem at all. A quick inventory of his freezer finds her a frozen pizza; that, it seems, will have to do. She shoves it in the oven and considers binging and purging before Sean arrives home from work. The rational, robotic Emma takes over and reminds her that she must put tiny, cut-up pieces of food in her mouth like a good girl and let them sit in her stomach poisoning her instead of cleansing herself. There must be something to distract her, something else that she can exert control over.
Sean's laundry is strewn all over the apartment, and she separates the darks and lights into two distinct piles. After her roundup she places both on the futon, unsure of where the apartment laundry machine is (she has no money for laundry regardless, she remembers), and continues on her quest with the small hand vacuum that she brought over from her house a week ago. The monotony of the task fascinates her. Square foot by square foot she goes over the shag carpeting and makes a mental note to buy some carpet cleaner later on. Suddenly her nostrils flare and she chokes on smoke. Her forgotten pizza is bringing the smoke detector to life, and as she moves toward the kitchenette and the potholders resting on the counter the door opens. "Emma?" Sean asks, confusion on his face and in his voice. "What are you doing here?" As she sets about dumping the burnt remnants of the pie into the sink and turns the water on, hoping to neutralize the smoke, he fiddles with the smoke detector until the high-pitched alarm dies away.
"It looks like I burnt dinner. Damn, I was hungry," she mutters, and because Sean has watched her carefully for the past two weeks and knows that she has not eaten more than half a salad and a glass of water at mealtimes, he laughs heartily. The sound turns a switch inside of Emma, and she walks towards him until she is safe in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder. "You may get killed if you stick around me. I seem to be an unlucky charm," she warns.
"Far from it," he murmurs in her ear, "and even if you were, I would be willing to take that risk."
"Why?" she asks plaintively. "Why do you keep coming back?" They both recognize the 'I love you' poised on his lips, but in a burst of wisdom Sean simply brings her face to his and kisses her. The warm tears that slip from behind her closed eyelids, the sensations that race through her body as she responds urgently to him, are anything but mechanical. Emma is thankful for someone like Sean in her life. He is strong and he is true and possesses a will of iron; and she knows that when he does choose to say I love you, she will mean her identical reply.
-0-0-0-
In two years Toby Isaacs hasn't kissed any girls. Suddenly, in the space of a week, he has kissed two. It is a scientific anomaly, an exception to the rules that he so studiously measures his entire life by. Neither situation ended well; that, he supposes, is the thread that holds his fragile picture of his life together. If he lives to be a hundred, things will end badly. Girls will break up with him in favor of someone smarter or more attractive or simply because they've grown tired of him; friends will die or kill others or maybe just forget what they liked about him in the first place. His father will be too absorbed with a new wife and a new job to remember that his mother isn't around anymore, and that he needs someone to cling to. Step sisters will leave for London and come back as completely different people. And he will be in the midst of it all, the lone unchanging characteristic to an ever altering background. This is something that he has accepted. But no matter the extreme, this wilderness has always had JT in it, and Toby isn't sure how to function without the best friend who often overshadows him and more times than not forgets about him completely. Now for the first time in years, Toby feels completely alone.
He has decided that he wants to be called Tobias. It is, after all, his given name, and it sounds strange enough to match his strange new life. When people call for Toby, he looks at them in amusement or ignores them completely. When Manny or Emma use old nicknames and familiar anecdotes to try to coax a smile or a word from him, he shrugs them off in the same way they've been shrugging him off for years. Tobias Isaacs, an awful, rhyming, Jewish name for an awful, disjointed, half gentile boy.
Toby wonders what this new man, this Tobias, is like. Are his eyes sad and burdened? Jaded and bitter? Cheerful and amused? It is hard to tell when this person he is becoming doesn't exist yet. The thirty seconds he spends in front of the mirror every day shed no light on this question, either; they seem as malleable and unsure as the person behind them. Perhaps he should do something bold to show his friends how he has changed: kiss Emma Nelson, buy a huge stock in a failing business. Something to show people that he is still here, goddammit. That he is more than the grieving best friend. Liberty, for all her faults, seemed to know this intuitively.
Liberty. He has always loved her, he realizes. He doesn't exert much energy loathing himself in light of this revelation, because he never acted on these feelings, never even knew of them, until there was no possibility that JT would ever be with Liberty. Maybe that in itself makes him a coward. This new person, he decides, isn't off to a very smooth start. Should he pick up a two dollar self help book from the grocery store? Apologize to everyone he's ever wronged (not that there are many)?
One thing is for sure, judging from the curious and sympathetic looks people in the hallways give him and the way Ashley and Jimmy have made more of an effort to include him in their outings. He isn't going to simply go back to being invisible. Now that he is in his senior year there is no one left to hide behind, and the grief that has stripped him so raw has brought unwanted attention (the cruelest kind to someone who so often yearns for it) to every flaw, blemish, and indiscretion. The old Toby would have no problem holding his head up high walking through the hallway, making chatty remarks to the cheerleading captain or approaching Jimmy. Now he avoids everyone, wishing more than ever to reassume the role he has played so perfectly for eighteen years.
Curiously, it is JT's words that haunt him. At some point, you just have to risk it all. You have to fall and break if you're ever going to fly. Such remarks come easily for someone as outgoing and magnetic as JT. He would have been successful, in more ways than one. Even if Liberty had kept the baby, or he had gotten mixed up in some bad stuff, he would have come out on the other side. Toby isn't sure he has it in him to fly. It was Rick, after all, who had feathers tarred to him.
Toby looks down at his hands. A person's hands can tell the story of their whole life if you look closely enough; his own, upon study, prove to be average in length and slightly pudgy, but the flesh is hardened, cracked in some places and calloused in others. They are not flying hands. They are not even feeling hands. He starts when a pair of feminine hands drops into his. "Penny for your thoughts," Ashley says, sitting down Indian style in front of him.
"You're usually willing to pay a good dollar to avoid hearing them," he says, and he is sad that his voice carries its same old humorous, self-deprecating tone.
"I'm your sister. You think I don't know you after all these years?" she says. They've never referred to their relationship as such; loose acquaintances, yes, or step sibling in the presence of adults and friends. The blue of her eyes and the curl of her hair are inviting, soft and familiar.
"Who am I, Ashley? I don't know anymore," Toby whispers, deciding that maybe he loathes the name Tobias after all. He is, after all, simply in shock. These thoughts running through his head hardly belong to his brain.
"You don't have to," she tells him gently, and when he leans his head against her shoulder, she cradles him like a small child. Suddenly the e-mails and pictures she sent him while she was away crowd his head, and he recalls the birthday present she spent practically all her money buying and shipping overnight, just so it would get to him in time. She is his family. She is his home. She doesn't have the answers, but she is willing to search with him. He is not ashamed of weeping with relief over this revelation.
-0-0-0-
Ellie fumbles through the stack of Craig's letters. Her article is on her bedside table, but these seem more important now. Every word, every thought, every smear of ink on the pages of college ruled notebook paper suddenly seem poetic to her. His handwriting is so familiar that it could be hers. She imagines him sitting at the back of the rec room he describes so vividly, scrawling away about group therapy – he jokes that it's a pleasant familiarity – and the pointless chores that they make him do. His frustration emanates from the letters as he talks about his inability to write a song this past month and how having his medication monitored so tightly rubs salt in a wound that's been reopened too many times.
Even clean, he is a mess. When they very first became friends, she believed that this would change with time, once he got his life together. She learned over and over again, many times painfully, that this wasn't the case. It is so hard, so fucking hard, to not be the one picking up the scattered pieces that comprise him. She has done it too many times, and it is a thankless task.
Jesse loves her. She practically drove him to infidelity (had they ever even mentioned the words "exclusive"?), and he came back begging for forgiveness. He has been there for her every step of the way, trying to protect her from everything. Even Craig. Looking at these pages stained with her own tears, she wishes that he could protect her from herself. If she's honest with herself, and she rarely is these days, she's known all along that Craig Manning can't be erased from her life or her heart with a departing plane.
Her guilt is not enough to hold her back.
"Dear Craig," she begins, biting the end of her pen. "I've missed you a lot. It seems like lately you're everywhere I look. I'm glad to hear that you're doing so well…" But he isn't doing well. He's in hell, and the last thing he'll want to hear are her platitudes. "Come home soon. I need you." It's ironic that she can only write five sentences for his five pages when she's the one majoring in journalism. This isn't important, she understands. He'll know. He always does. "Love, Ellie."
-0-0-0-
Liberty stares down at the letter in her hands. Early acceptance, just like she'd hoped, and with a partial scholarship, just like she needs. This is what her life in a nutshell has boiled down to: thirteen years of academic torture, hours of extra credit work done in the biology lab, a valedictorian speech still to be written, and a cream coloured piece of stationery declaring her above and beyond acceptable. It is achingly, blatantly worthless in light of recent events.
J.T. had laughed at her dream of attending Queens University and gently teased her aspirations, calling her his mad scientist. Now all that interests her is the science of death, and that's something that no school will be able to teach her, let alone help her reverse. She used to disdain his ability to make the world seem small, but now five minutes have become her whole universe. The scene replays constantly in her head. A boy, lying on the ground. Mouth open, eyes shocked and scared, then: expressionless. Blood seeping through the weave of a white cotton shirt. The skin she has touched so many times clammy against her chest. There is no escape from this nightmare because it's impossible to wake up.
What would he have done with his life? He could have been a famous comedian or appeared on TV screens in the homes of children all around the country. Maybe, with his love of animals, he would have gone to veterinary school. Liberty can picture his thin frame draped in a white lab coat. Would he have loved her? Would they have been enough for each other?
Liberty sits down at her computer and begins to type out a response. Her parents will be ecstatic when they hear the news. And in the fall, when she goes to Queens, a school where everything is new and nothing will remind her of JT, she just might escape the nightmare.