Bruises & Beer Bottles
Cade-centric. Multi-chapter fic. AU.
Each night I cry - I still believe the lie. I'll love you, 'till I die.
He was more like his mother than he was his father, although that could change.
His mother's eyes, round and shining black like oil, stared out at him from every mirror. The resemblance was close enough to scare him, because he didn't want to be anything like her. Funny, how some kids wanted to be just like their parents. He guessed it make sense, if you had parents like Ponyboy, who held their chins high and spoke softly. Parents who didn't hit you, or who at least noticed when you weren't around.
Kids who wanted to be like their parents were on an ever-growing, all-spanning list of things Johnny over thought and still didn't understand.
Oh, and his father… His father…
The similarities were much harder to unearth, which made Johnny's stomach a little less sick. His father, he was always to himself around other people. Always the introvert, always guarded. Johnny was too, sort of, in a different way for different reasons. Robert Cade had to hide who he was because nobody would get near a monster, because it could cause trouble for him, because he was alone.
Johnny, he was put down all his life; he was thankful and humble and very, very sad for it, the best years of his youth had turned him into an old man by sixteen.
The carried themselves the same way, though, with their heads down, eyes on the cracks in the sidewalk. This is the walk born out of hatred, shameful hatred; Robert's for the world, and Johnny's internal – for himself.
Johnny, he never hated, not really. Maybe for his father, if a night was particularly rough, with scuffed floors and broken glass explosions and the hardness of his parents eyes and knuckles and dust crumbling from walls and –
And all the other things that gave him nightmares when all the other little kids were afraid of monsters in the closet. That hate usually vanished the next day and brought a sense of misunderstanding and familiar pain. Sore bones and deep muscle bruises, a heavy heart and paper thin wrists that were just dying for a –
No. He promised Dal he wouldn't think like that.
Dally never understood why somebody would turn their rage inside, punish themselves with death, while the guilty person went on and on and on. He said he couldn't get on without Johnny, none of them could. They needed him around.
So he didn't even think about it. (Lie)
Maybe that's something he got from his dad. A compulsion to lie, to cover things up, a classic trick to avoiding emotional intimacy with anybody at all. Though Johnny really preferred to say nothing at all than to tell a lie, but there were some things you jut couldn't talk about. Things that were too painful. So what was wrong with saying you're okay if you're not?
The fundamental difference between Robert Cade and his boy was the mean streak and the anger and that horrible selfishness that combined to turn a once-decent man (lie- Bobby Cade was never decent) into an accident waiting to happen… to other people, of course. It was a combination you were born with that settled in your stomach and waited boiling in your blood.
Robert had gone angry young. As far as Johnny was concerned, he'd always been this way. In the odd photo he found here and there, the kind stuffed in the back of a closet or the bottom of a drawer, you just might see Bobby sneering well through his twenties. He was famous for that sneer.
That was the cynicism from working too hard, too young. That was his dad's drinking, his dad's uselessness, his dad's lack of support. That sneer was all the things Robert Cade promised himself he wouldn't turn into and did.
Those promises that he drowned so often; they just wouldn't die. Stubborn things, lies.
Johnny's mother still had a soul, somewhere, buried deep. Sometimes, if he was lucky and his father was sleeping heavy, he would catch a hint of it, but nothing more. Like a miracle, it was unreal, rare, and ever-fleeting. And every single time he sees it – this sympathy from his mother - he thinks it'll be the last time and never expects it to resurface again.
Johnny had seen it last back before Easter of the year before, when his father was still working, or drinking, or whatever he did outside of the house. Her eyes hadn't seemed so dark, then; that was the last time Johnny had watched her so close to see that spark of life. Then, it burnt out, it was gone; you can only be let down so often before you get smart, and learn to bury those feelings so you're never disappointed again.
But now, as he sweeps up some broken glass off of the living room floor, he glimpses that sympathy, that almost-love; that almost-anything…
It's the way she pushes the hair back on his forehead, in that bizarre limbo between the hangover and the wind-down in the morning. It's the way she tells him she wasn't always a train wreck. It was marriage, it was kids. His dad, too, but most especially, it was Johnny. Then it was his brother, God rest his soul, but that could've been Johnny's fault, too.
The two of them, they made a mess out of her, and somewhere along the way she'd found a crutch.
Every chain reaction starts somewhere; this one starts with doubt.
She finds herself thinking in What If's, measuring her life in should've-beens and could've-beens. If she hadn't left the water running. If she'd heard the baby crying.
Back further - If her firstborn son had tangled up in her umbilical chord and lost his air. If her firstborn son hadn't come out with those oil eyes that made Robert see her in him and hate them both for it.
Back further. If she hadn't pulled down Roger Wilson, parting for him her lips and thighs. If she hadn't, there would've been no doubt. No chain reaction.
Lisa always knew Johnny was Roberts, always. She'd never doubted it. He didn't believe her, even now, with Wilson years later lying peaceful in a cemetery somewhere in Oklahoma City and no reason to keep on lying.
Her eyes are glassy when Johnny tries to take the beer out of her hand, thinking in a naïve sort of way, taking it would save her. Well, surprise; she doesn't let him – she pulls back sharply and looks at him like a bear protecting her baby cub. He wonders where that fierce protection was when he needed it the most.
His mother had fire to her; this, he did not understand.
The suffering is back in her eyes. It's in that swelling bruise on her cheek, spreading from just under her left ear. It's easy looking at Lisa Cade, to think she might have been pretty once, but those days were long over. They were replaced by nights black and blue with bruises and beer bottles.
Lisa had her own list; another thing they had in common, her and her firstborn son. The one she kept was that punched-in-the-gut feeling, the same she got when her husband walked in a room. The feeling that left her out of breath and dizzy with fear before he even touched her, that was the heavy sense of her guilt; her albatross and anchor.
Lisa had a list of excuses that swam behind her eyes and sedated her, drowned that feeling of self-hatred and guilt with a little help from these shining bottles and brown paper bags.
It was marriage. It was the kids. It was Roger Wilson and her second biggest mistake that night against the busted mattress.
But it sure as hell wasn't the booze - that's what kept her together.
"Jus' need…Jus' need…" Her words disappear, her voice growing sharply quiet as the train of her thoughts slide away, and there's a rustling in the next room. Her shoulders square and tense up. Is he coming out?
Almost instantly she regains her composure and all that humanity is folded up like laundry, tucked away on a shelf. He can see it; the way the soul disappears from the pupils of her eyes, and she tells him to leave – she doesn't yell it this time.
He knows better than to let that fool him, now, and he doesn't know where he'll go yet. but he's out the front door before she can wail after him not to bother coming back. He never fights.
And that's why he's not like either of them.
A/N:
First post. If I've abused punctuation(I've been known to, sadly), have long rambling sentences, and/or have been unsuccessful in a tense experiment I wanted to play with(jumping around from past to present) please let me know! I allowed myself a lot of wiggle room here stylistically because I wanted to experiment a little bit. Did it work?
The lyrics from "Save Me" by Queen reminded me of Johnny and his parents - how he still 'believes the lie' and believes in that blood connection to his parents - the bond that cannot be dissolved.
I disclaim ownership of everything, except Johnny's fictional dead baby brother.