Gen or pre-slash, depending on what goggles you're wearing.
Long After You're Gone
One-shot
He was barely eighteen when his family burned.
The lawyers thought he'd hated them, thought that his blank reactions was some indicator of sociopathy. No one considered shock or that he hadn't meant for the fire to get so out of control. He'd just needed to calm down that night, distract himself from the crushing weight that came every time he realized he had no plan.
Court-appointed as his lawyer was, she'd been a damn bleeding heart. She pulled in shrinks and medical records, arguing against premeditated murder and pushing for involuntary manslaughter. He was an arsonist, but he hadn't meant to kill anyone. As much as he and his old man had bumped heads about things on the farm, he'd loved him. He'd loved his mom and his brat siblings too.
They put him on the stand and he answered each question like a robot until he came out of the fog enough to realize it was Lacey's sixth birthday. Was. Would have been. She didn't have birthdays anymore and it was all because of him.
It was the first time he cried, hysterical and sobbing in front of people that thought he was some kind of stone-cold killer. People that thought he'd done it on purpose. People that thought he'd wanted to burn his parents and four siblings so bad that his damn grandparents couldn't see their babies one last time before they put them in the ground.
They hadn't let him go to the funerals.
He threw up as the bailiff came to lead him somewhere else, legs like jelly and head full of Lacey's gap-toothed smile and Matt's smattering of freckles under big dorky glasses. Hands grabbing at shoulders and fingers clutching at fabric, he begged for his family. Lacey. Matt. Clara. Emma.
He hadn't called his mom Momma since he was ten and went to juvie for the first time, but he pleaded for her then.
He choked on begging for his dad and threw up again. He'd killed them all. Burned them alive, his parents in their bed and his siblings curled up together in the blanket fort they'd made around the TV so they could watch Honey, I Shrunk The Kids on their shitty VCR.
Honey, I Burned The Kids.
Burned. Killed. Murdered.
His fault.
They'd never had a chance.
"I'm sorry," he sobbed into a stranger's chest. He repeated it, over and over until the words bled together.
He wished he'd burned too.
He pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter days later when the prosecutor started agreeing with his lawyer. He took the jail time, mixed in with demands for mental help. They said he was sick. He was still numb enough to think he was a monster.
"The security here sucks," Len murmured into the phone when he visited a month into Mick's five-year sentence.
"No." He leveled a tired look at Len through the plexiglas between them, head fuzzy with the drugs they put down his throat every morning. He didn't want Len to break him out. He could already see the calculating look and knew his friend had been counting guards the whole time he'd been there. Spotting cameras. Taking note of security measures. He could break him out, probably with the grace and skill of something that belonged more on a spy than an eighteen-year-old pain in the ass, but he could do it.
He didn't want him to.
"It wasn't your fault."
"It was. I gotta live with it. Gotta pay for it too," he lowered his voice, "for them. Just let me, alright? Save it for next time."
There would always be a next time, he realized later after they'd put him back in his cell. There was no saving him. No redemption.
Maybe Len had the right idea about life as a criminal.
Len was waiting for Mick the day he was released, chest tight with nerves as he walked out a free man. There was a bottle of pills rattling in his pocket that he told himself he'd keep taking, but a bigger part of him knew he wouldn't.
"Didn't think you'd come this close with the warrant out."
Len shrugged, too repressed to say he'd wanted to be there for him, but Mick knew. He always knew what Len was thinking. "Thought you could use a drink," he said as he swung his leg over the bike, one eyebrow raised as he waited for Mick to join him.
"You got a license for this thing?"
Len's laugh was drowned out by the roar of the engine.
Len took him to the cemetery.
Mick punched him hard enough to make his own hand ache.
Len held out a bottle of whiskey and told him to mourn.
He didn't mention how Mick cried.
"I saw you, you know," Mick said that night as they lay in separate beds in a shitty motel room. "At the trial."
Len hummed and flipped the page of his book.
"Thought you were on a job with your old man."
"I was."
Mick's fingers curled into a fist, pulling at foggy memories of sad eyes watching him as he was led off the stand. Len's jaw had been bruised, marks higher than normal. Lewis didn't usually hit higher than what could be covered with clothes, but he remembered Len had been wearing a turtleneck. Remembered the twist in his gut that broke through his grief and the knowledge that underneath the neckline were finger-shaped marks. Len had paid to be there for him.
He heard the rustle of blankets moving, but he didn't look over as Len slid in next to him. Didn't look at Len's face as he curled in next to the other man's side. "You're not as scrawny anymore," he said in place of a thank you.
Len snorted. "You're welcome." He wrapped an arm around Mick's shoulders and kept reading his book.
His parents never said it, too polite to say they hated the too-skinny fourteen-year-old that looked like he was twelve, but Mick knew. They'd looked at Len and saw a criminal, two juvie stints shy of Mick's three, but too good with his hands to have a future on the legal side of anything. They'd still let him into the house, though, preferring that to Mick sneaking out at odd hours, but they'd seen Len's bruises and assumed problem child instead of problems at home. Len had let them, cementing it with cold eyes and sharper words.
He'd always been more gentle with his siblings. Warmer. He'd understood with a glance that Mick loved them the way he loved Lisa. The big brother. The protector.
Mick wondered if Len had mourned them too.
"Did you go?" he asked one night as he stared into his drink. "To the funerals?"
"You couldn't."
Years later, sitting in the quiet of the Waverider, Len would tell him he'd buried a little gift at the base of each headstone for them. Mick would lose his voice behind the lump in his throat and squeeze his hand to say thank you.
The End