It's long after midnight, and John's only been under his father's roof for a little over a week, when Jeff first encounters his second son outside of work.
It's just a brief glimpse of John, crossing the hallway from the guest room to the bathroom. Jeff catches sight of him quite accidentally, from where he sits in the living room, nursing a quiet glass of bourbon before he'll catch a few hours of sleep.
There's a solid click of the light switch in the bathroom, and the door stays open, spilling light into the dark hallway. Jeff grunts a minor note of disapproval, but doesn't move from where he sits. John more or less has the run up the place. It's not as though decorum really matters.
The light continues to flood the hallway, but Jeff doesn't hear what he expects. Curious, straining his hearing slightly, Jeff listens to soft sounds from beyond the open bathroom door, cupboard doors opening and closing. Shuffling noises, quiet muttering. It's not until he hears the rattle of pills against plastic that interest (concern) gets the better of him, and he gets up to investigate.
It's probably just that John has a headache, Jeff tells himself, as he steals into the hallway to creep up to the open bathroom door. It's probably just that he needs a couple aspirin and he can't find them. It's not as though any of the boys are in town very often, certainly it's been a while since anyone stayed at the penthouse. There's no way John's lapsed back into his habit so quickly, but Jeff still stalks quietly to the bathroom door and peers in, expecting the worst.
John doesn't notice his father in the doorway behind him. The bathroom mirror faces the door and Jeff can see his son's face, and he's apparently absorbed by his current task—twisting the childproof cap off a bottle of antacids. There's a snap of plastic as this is accomplished, and Jeff watches as his son upends the bottle over the sink. A rain of small pink ovals rattles against the porcelain, sixty or so tablets scattering into the bowl or bouncing up onto the counter. John shakes the empty bottle once, twice and then, satisfied, moves on to another bottle, aspirin. Xanax follows, then an antihistamine. Then Tylenol, Advil, half a leftover codeine prescription from the time Jeff had thrown out his back. Jeff watches, transfixed by the blank serenity of John's features, somnambulant.
So, sleepwalking. All of Jeff's boys had been subject to different flavours of sleep disorder, generally mild, nothing too concerning. Virgil had been the one with sleep terrors, John with insomnia. Alan's the one who'd been plagued by sleepwalking, though it had stopped once he'd hit adolescence. Jeff has to pause a few moments to remember the do's and don'ts of sleepwalkers. Not new in the family, but definitely new in John.
Or, at least, as far as he knows. He'd had John's apartment cleaned out and his possessions brought out west—and as Gordon had mentioned, the place was bare, nearly empty as the day it was rented. Maybe it had been a deliberate precaution on John's part, maybe sleepwalking is just something else his father wouldn't have heard about. Neither here nor there.
"John?" Jeff says softly, and goes unheard. It was always nigh on impossible to wake Alan, back when he was little, but he would drowsily ramble on when prompted. More often than not it was a case of just herding the boy back to bed. He has to wonder if the rules are different for drug addicts.
Blithely unaware of the fact that he's being watched, John unscrews the lid off a forgotten bottle of fish oil capsules, and is briefly stymied by the fact that they've aged past their prime, and gotten stuck together in a lump inside the bottle.
The entire mass of congealed pills dislodges itself and the impact into the sink is loud and sudden enough that John starts awake. Vagueness sharpens into immediate terror, disorientation, and he yells, reels away from the counter and the mirror at the sight of his own reflection, like he's seen a ghost. Jeff isn't quite quick enough to clear the door way, and his son runs straight into him.
John's of a height with his father, but not nearly as well muscled. He's all long limbs and trembling as Jeff catches hold of his shoulders. He slides his hands down to gently pin John's arms at his sides before he can lash out, wild-eyed and frantic and not actually awake yet. It's a long practiced motion, though it was last practiced on a tiny scrap of a blonde ten-year-old. Alan, only eight at the time, had once been spooked badly enough upon being woken that he'd given his father a hell of a black eye. Lesson learned.
"Easy! John. Johnny, stop. John. John, stop. Cut it out, c'mon. It's just Dad. Come on, you're all right. You've been sleepwalking. You're okay."
Jeff can't remember the last time he'd actually touched his son, because he finds himself alarmed at just how thin the boy's gotten—how clear it becomes that he is just a boy. In the daylight, even in spite of whatever he's gone through, John still cuts a tall, sharp figure through the offices of Tracy Industry's West Coast HQ. After dark, at home, with no one to impress—the NASA t-shirt he's worn to bed hangs off his narrow shoulders, though Jeff remembers the long ago trip when it had been purchased, a souvenir from Cape Canaveral, and how a men's large had been a much better fit on his son at eighteen than his son at twenty-four.
It takes a few repetitions of the facts before John's green eyes stop darting about and he seems to realize where he is, stares at his father in mortified recognition. John's still shaky and startled and Jeff doesn't comment further as his second son breaks away, manages the few steps to the toilet and sinks atop the seat, pulling a hand down his face and then rubbing ferociously at his eyes.
His father has a certain sense of decorum, and the sense to go to the kitchen and get his son a glass of water, pretend he doesn't notice the emotional aftermath.
Except—
Ignorance of the emotional aftermath might be what has John under his roof in the first place.
Jeff Tracy is a man of deeply held ideals. He believes in autonomy and self-efficacy, believes in raising his boys to be their own men. Believes they're all brilliant, all capable of greatness, whether he thrusts it upon them or just thrusts them out into the world to stumble into it on their own.
He hadn't been wrong about John. He just hadn't expected his son to push beyond his limits instead of pushing back, in service of something he'd never wanted.
The glass he's filling from the tap in the kitchen overflows, cold water running over his fingers. He drains it himself and then sets it aside, heads back to the bathroom.
The door's been closed, but the light still shines underneath it, and when Jeff tries the handle, it's not locked.
John's standing in front of the mirror again, carefully sorting pills back into bottles. He doesn't look up when the door opens behind him, though this time he's fixed and focused on his task. His eyes dart up briefly, catch the gaze of his father's reflection, and then drop back down as though he's hoping it wasn't noticed.
Jeff clears his throat, awkward the way he almost never is. He's still in his shirt sleeves, his tie loose at his throat, and he's aware that he wears his age far more accurately than John wears his. "John? You don't need to do that, don't worry about it. You should go back to bed."
"It's fine," John answers, deceptively neutral, though Jeff can see his hands are still trembling slightly. "I'm fine, Dad, sorry. Sorry, I'll just—fix this. I'll fix this and then I should—should probably, um, probably I should get up anyway. Sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."
"You didn't wake me. I got in from a conference call with Tokyo, I hadn't gone to bed yet. Johnny, it's three in the morning. You need to get some sleep. Go in late tomorrow, it's fine."
A stubborn shake of his son's head and Jeff feels a funny sort of quirk of his jaw, a twitch of irritation at what seems like defiance. It's not, and this is a knee jerk reaction that he muscles past, even as John stammers his way through further objections, "I'm really okay. It's okay. It's just, I need to just—"
"John, it's not necessary. I mean it now, stop that." Unbidden, not quite meaning to, he reaches into the bathroom from where he hangs in the doorway, and catches John's elbow. He's not just thin, he's cold to the touch and Jeff's suddenly more concerned than he was a moment ago. "John. Come on."
"I'll go for a run," John answers, disconnectedly, even as he leaves the counter and permits himself to be pulled into the hallway. "Disordered sleep is a common side-effect during…a-after. With, uh, with detox. I read about it. My doctor said, it's not uncommon. Just stay busy. It's fine. I'm fine."
"You're not going to go for a run," Jeff answers firmly, and ushers his son to back to his bedroom. "Back in bed, John."
"I don't think I can sleep."
Jeff very seriously doubts that, if anything like what he remembers about Alan is also true about John, in this state. The way the boy stumbles, the way he doesn't protest being shown back to bed, sitting down on the mattress and yawning—Jeff hopes he'll drop right back off to sleep. "Well, you can rest, anyway. Come on, son."
John's still shaking his head, even as he lies back, and permits his father to make some cursory adjustments to the pillows, straighten the blankets. "Gotta—I start at seven, wanna be up at five anyway. Two hours, I could—could at least fix the bathroom. Fix it, I mean, fix the sink. It's a mess. I didn't mean to—"
"I know you didn't. It's fine. You were sleepwalking, it's all right." Jeff bends over to pull the blankets up to his son's shoulders, remembering the way he'd been shivering. John's certainly not going for a run, that's absurd. He's already nestled back down beneath a heavy down comforter, soft linen sheets. It's the guest room, all cool blues and greens, pale blonde wood and stainless steel. John's ginger hair is the only shock of real colour in the room, though the warmth of this is cooled as Jeff turns off the bedside lamp.
For a few moments there's just soft breathing in the silence, and then, muttered and drowsy, "Dad, I'm really sorry. Dad? M'sorry."
This last is so vague and sad sounding that Jeff wonders if John's actually woken up at all, or if the muddled up way he blusters and protests has all just been more sparks and short circuits across an exhausted, worn out brain. Jeff sits down at the end of the bed, carefully shifts to accommodate the length of John's legs. "It's okay, John. Shh, now."
"But I didn't mean it."
"I know, John." Jeff pauses, and tries to remember what he'd used to do when it had been Virgil, with his big brown eyes still seeing whatever horrors had scared him awake, or Alan, with bruised shins from tripping over whatever obstacles he'd encountered on one of his late night adventures. "Did I ever tell you," Jeff starts, and keeps his voice soft and thoughtful, "about the time your Uncle Lee and I had our lunar rover break down on the far side of the moon?"
He has, and he knows he has. Knows this was always one of John's favourites, too. It's years since he told any of his boys stories, but the lead-in is traditional, and he gets a quiet, "Mmm?" in answer, and continues, smiling to himself.
"Well, it was back in '34. Me and your uncle were supposed to map the site for the staging area for the next Mars mission, some preliminary surveying. We were all packed up in the rover and ready to go, and—now, your Uncle Lee tells this bit differently, but you just remember he's got a memory like a sieve about this kind of thing—I said, 'Lee, make sure we have a couple spare fuel cells, don't wanna get stranded out there' and he said, 'Sure, Jeff, I'll double-check.' Well. Now, let me tell you a few things about driving a rover on the moon—"
He's told the whole story, softly and without the sort of sound effects that usually accompany the more dramatic elements, by the time he's quite certain that John's dropped back off. There's a glass of bourbon back in the living room, though by this time the ice has probably melted and watered it into undrinkability, by Jeff's high, exacting standards. He needs to be back in the office in another few hours anyway.
He gets up, limbs a little creakier than they should be, and stretches. The alarm clock beside the bed casts a blue glow, a quarter after four. And his son thinks he needs to be up at five. Jeff shakes his head to himself, reaches down and turns the alarm off, decides that John deserves to take a day and take it easy.
Half-closing the bedroom door behind him, Jeff takes a few minutes to detour to the bathroom and sort a sinkful of pills back into their respective bottles. If John's anything like Alan always was, he won't remember anything about getting up and wandering the halls, and there's no need to give him anything else to worry about.
On his way to his own master suite, he can't seem to help checking on John again, though he's fast asleep with his arms locked around one of his pillows and his face buried against it. Jeff leans over to peer at his son one last time. Still young. Younger than he acts, and young enough that when Jeff gently ruffles his hair, he feels like a proper father again, in the sort of way that makes him realize that maybe he hasn't been, where John's concerned.