so the idea that lionel shrike and thaddeus bradley were friends absolutely ruins me for a variety of reasons, here's some fic about that idea, and about the potential for some kind of dynamic to form with thaddeus and dylan. they have a lot to talk about, now, don't they?
(title from an a softer world comic panel.)
comments always appreciated, let me know what you think!
KETA
an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past
"I remember you." Dylan sounds small and off balance, like a man who just found out everything he knew to be true was all a lie. Not an inaccurate assessment of recent events, Thaddeus supposes, so the reaction is appropriate.
"Do you?" Thaddeus asks, face still bearing that impassive, faint smile that drove Dylan up the wall for so long.
"Yeah. I do. You were there the night before it happened, the night before he died." It takes a few moments, a steeling of nerves; it takes swallowing like all the immensity of human grief is held in Dylan's mouth and if he just tries hard enough he can choke it back down, before he can go on. "You told him not to do it."
"I told Lionel a lot of things." There's a regretful fondness in Thaddeus's voice. "He never listened to me. Not even once. Not even when he really should have."
"Yeah that sounds like him," Dylan says with a short, breathless laugh. He's looking at Thaddeus and not really seeing him. At least, not really seeing him as he is now. Instead, all Dylan can see is thirty years into the past, the night before everything changed.
"Lionel, don't do this," a voice had said out in the living room, when Dylan was supposed to be asleep. "It's too risky, there are too many variables. You don't have to try something this reckless, we can come up with something else. Be smart, do the cautious thing for once in your life, if not because I asked you to then for your son."
"I'm not going to try," Lionel had said with a voice Dylan's mother had always called Shrike Stubborn. "I'm going to succeed. And it's for Dylan that I have to. I have to show him that-"
"That what? That you're willing to die for a trick?"
"That impossible feat just means you haven't come up with the right plan yet, that as long as you keep something up your sleeve, nothing can ever trap you."
Dylan can't see the other man in the conversation through the crack between his bedroom door and the doorframe, but he sees the way his father's face changes, shifts from brazen challenge to apologetic sympathy.
"I'll be fine," Lionel said, giving the mysterious man an encouraging smile. "I always am. I'm Lionel Shrike, remember?"
Dylan never catches a glimpse of the man's face that night, just hears his voice, the frustration and fear in it. The only part of the stranger he ever sees is a hand, gripping his father's shoulder with clawed fingers that give away how scared he really is as he embraces Lionel before he leaves.
"Be careful, Shrike."
"You know it."
"I remember you," Dylan says again, and he's looking at the picture in his hands this time. "I can't believe I never put it together."
Thaddeus graciously doesn't point out the part where all he had to go on was a voice he heard once the night before his father died. It wouldn't be a productive conversation, right now at least.
What Dylan says next surprises Thaddeus, which is not a feat easily accomplished.
"I'm sorry."
Thaddeus blinks. "What for?"
"For prison. For the things I said. For all the ways you were… the villain in my psychodrama, every time I spoke to you."
"You're giving yourself too much credit there, I think," counters Thaddeus with a quirked eyebrow. "You're forgetting that while I played the villain to you, I also cast myself in the role, and acted it rather impressively, if I do say so myself."
The sounds of the Horsemen filter in from the other room as Dylan and Thaddeus sit there together in silence. Dylan's eyes drift over to the table on which he'd found the photo in his hands, taking in the other images of Thaddeus Bradley and Lionel Shrike, working and smiling side by side. As he looks at these pictures and listens to Jack and Lula laugh at some comment Merritt made at Daniel's expense, Dylan finds himself imagining. Imagining what it would be like to watch one of them die, to stand by a cold, dark river as one of his Horsemen drowned, and be able to do nothing about it.
He's been there, of course, both in the literal sense of being by that river when his father died and in the metaphorical sense of having imagined it before, seen all their deaths in his dreams.
This time, the morbid hypothetical has another element, though. This time Dylan imagines watching one of them go under one, two, seven minutes too long, then imagines having to pretend it wasn't personal. He imagines cameras on him, knowing he can't so much as call out their name, able to betray nothing but a general somberness at a tragedy, to say nothing about whose tragedy it was.
It continues then, Dylan imagining spending thirty years still pretending, no visible mourning permissible lest it give him away, then the child of the partner he lost, the friend, standing in front of him and saying 'you did this'.
Thaddeus had said he didn't know why he didn't just come clean, the day Dylan and the Horsemen got him put in prison, but Dylan has a pretty good idea. His own confession letter is sitting sealed in an envelope at home, written the night after he'd stood on a bridge and thought his vendetta got Jack Wilder killed. And he hadn't even known the kid yet, not personally.
Dylan wonders if, given the chance he himself could show up any second, not to mention who else could see him, if Thaddeus had ever gotten the chance to visit Lionel Shrike's empty grave.
"Would you tell me about him, sometime?" Dylan asks suddenly, overheard late night conversations, hypothetical losses, and the toll of thirty years worth of feigned indifference swimming around his head. "My dad. I only know what I can remember, my mom died before either of us could bring ourselves to talk about him, so. I don't really know much. About who he was, and you…" Dylan looks again to the pictures on the table, the untold background behind each of them. "You must have stories. I would appreciate hearing them, if you'd be willing to tell me."
Many things he may be, but one thing Thaddeus isn't is easily fooled. He knows Dylan's request is as much for him as it is for Dylan himself. He thinks about it for a moment, about all the times he caught himself just before saying something about Lionel, all the times he almost turned to talk to the man before he remembered.
"I would like that very much," Thaddeus says.
Lionel Shrike's son looks like him when he smiles.