Title: Four Men
Author: kenzimone
Disclaimer: Don't own.
Fandom: Four Brothers (+ four more)
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2,800
Summary: These are the men Evelyn Mercer prays for at night.
Note: This has been collecting dust on my hard drive since late '09. Figured I'd clean it up a bit and post it. [Multiverse crossover].
In the evenings Evelyn retreats to the sanctuary that is her bedroom. She closes the door against the strumming of Jack's guitar and the rough housing of his brothers, and then she kneels on the floor by her bed, eyes closed and head bowed.
She grips her rosary in her hand, runs a thumb over the beads and lets each stroke call forth the specter of a child that has passed through her house. Slowly and systematically she remembers them, lets her heart ache with the unequivocal knowledge that they are safe and loved. One by one, until only four remain.
These are the ones she lost, the ones that were taken places she could not follow by forces she could not combat. These are the men Evelyn Mercer prays for at night.
i.
Brian is small and scarred and silent.
He is one of her very firsts, a temporary placement, but Evelyn is young and naïve (just past thirty), and believes she can save him and change the system all at once.
The social worker who brings him to her has no papers for her to see, no information beyond what Evelyn can already read in the resigned and unspoken terror on the small boy's face. She scoops him up in her arms, clutches him tightly, and he allows it (lets her carry him in through the door and into the living room, compliant like a giant rag doll, defeated and with no fight left in him).
She doesn't need details, she thinks. She has love and tenderness, and this boy will thrive and grow and learn to overcome.
...
Brian is seven years old and cannot be left alone to bathe. Sitting waist deep in the warm water, he is slack against Evelyn's supporting hands – apathetic, eyes locked on immobile, submerged limbs, yet actually seeing something far beyond. She kneels on the floor beside the bathtub and holds him upright, steadies him so he doesn't slip beneath the water (wonders briefly if he'd struggle to break the surface should she let go, and hates herself for thinking as much).
When she runs the washcloth across his skin he doesn't react, but if she takes too long to get him out of the water (if his fingers and toes start to wrinkle and prune), he snaps – starts screeching like a trapped, wounded animal, clawing and pulling at her clothes until she wraps him in a towel and tugs him out of the bathtub and onto her lap.
...
Evelyn tries to get him to talk but he stares past her, fixates on something over her shoulder, and no matter how loudly she tries she can never quite manage to make herself heard above the screams she imagines play on a loop in his head.
She spoon feeds him his breakfast, lunch and dinner; in the evenings she curls up on her couch and pulls him close, points at the television screen and whispers one sided conversations into his ear.
...
One day she leaves him in the living room with a box of old toys, hand me downs worn from passing through numerous loving hands in their lifetime. She's only gone for a minute, but when she returns Brian has carefully extracted all of the dolls in the box and lined them up on the floor in front of him.
Evelyn pauses in the doorway, holds her breath and waits for a breakthrough. She gets it in the form of a pained groan, and two dolls have their limbs ripped from their sockets before she manages to snap out of her shocked paralysis. Brian wiggles and squirms, bites and hits and pulls at her hair, and bays so loudly that she thinks she might go deaf.
The next morning the social worker who dropped him off once again knocks on Evelyn's door. She doesn't comment on Evelyn's swollen, split lip, but apologizes; 'severe psychological trauma', she says. Never should have left the care of the state.
Evelyn is battered and bruised, and tired. She puts up a fight as they carry the catatonic boy out of her house, but it doesn't stop her from waking up in the nights that follow, thinking she could – should – have done more, tried harder.
...
(Thirty odd years later Brian Moser dons the identity of a murdered man, and beneath a starry Miami sky his baby brother slits his throat.)
ii.
Michael is a pale shadow beneath her roof, tiny and quiet.
He's eleven and almost as old as Bobby, yet as one barges through the house swinging hockey sticks and shouting at the top of his voice, the other remains silent on the living room floor, large eyes taking in the headlines of the morning's news paper as his fingertips trace the long, flowing sentences.
He reads the articles again and again, even the ones in the financial section; doesn't turn the page until he understands what everything written there means. So bright, Evelyn thinks. So very, very bright.
Still, he's a sad child, too.
...
She feels his eyes on her as she moves around the house, can see him following her from room to room, studying her movements and soaking them up as if she is a fascinating puzzle to be figured out. She says nothing about it, silently tolerating the scrutiny; if this is what it will take for him to feel safe, then she will endure it for as long as she has to.
...
His mother is dead – it's a fresh wound, still bleeding – and his father is a deserter, and Evelyn takes solace in the fact that there's a legal guardian, a brother whom she knows Michael loves very, very much.
Juvenile Hall, the man who brings Michael to her says. Assault charges.
Evelyn looks down at the lost child by the man's side and wonders how the responsibilities of newly found fatherhood suits a fifteen year old. This is a temporary respite, she thinks. For both of them.
...
Michael spends his days looking out the front window, waiting. She tries to coax him away at times, dangles promises of cookies and board games in front of his face, but nothing ever works.
Soon enough she stops trying, content with taking a seat by his side, sharing his vigil.
...
The first thing that the teenager on her doorstep says is his brother's name. The second thing he utters is a promise to never leave again.
Evelyn can't make them stay, no matter how much she wants to, so instead she helps Michael pack his small bag and listens in on his brother's finely spun tales of the promises of Chicago. Before he leaves, Michael hugs her goodbye and thanks her.
...
(Fifteen years later Lincoln Burrows kills the Vice President's brother, and Michael Scofield dresses in his Sunday best and walks into a bank carrying a loaded gun.)
iii.
Joseph is fiery eyes and a smart mouth.
He fights her every step of the way, bites and claws and kicks, and manages to run away twice in his first week at her house. She spends hours driving the wet streets of the city, Jeremiah a lookout in the passenger seat, hoping that she'll find him before trouble does.
The other children are afraid of him. Evelyn is no spring chicken, not anymore, and Bobby, the one person who might have been able to take this child and smother the anger churning inside his chest, has long since flown the coop. Try as she might, Evelyn has a hard time keeping up with this hellion sweeping through her home like a small tornado, leaving destruction and mayhem in his wake and adding to his already extensive collection of bruises.
They don't tell her from where Joseph came because they don't know – he was picked up off the streets two weeks prior, and there is no telling how long he had been living there (or if he ever had, at all). Drugs, the woman with the case file guesses. Violence. Gangs, perhaps.
Evelyn is careful, just in case – looks over her shoulder more often, makes extra sure the doors and windows are locked come bedtime. This is perhaps the only reason she notices the car that one day, the dark shadow of a shape that drives slowly past her on her way back from the corner market. She quickens her steps and on the other side of her front door she secures the deadbolt and tells Angel that she wants him to stay in that evening.
During dinner Joseph breaks two sets of plates, and Evelyn has no choice but to send him to his room.
...
She's awoken at gunpoint that night. It's not quite three o'clock, and while the face of the man at the other end of the barrel is smooth and still not completely devoid of all baby fat, his eyes are old and hard. When he tells her that he is there for the boy and that he won't hesitate to kill her, she believes him.
There are four other children asleep in my house, she thinks as she watches the shadows play against the contours of the gunman's shaved head. Four innocent lives, and the tattoo on the side of his neck looks freshly done, the ink black slashes against the white, moon bathed skin.
It's the only thing she can do, and five minutes later as the front door slams shut and the guttural roar of a Mustang's engine tears through the silence she knows that she will regret it to her last breath, but she tells him which room holds what he is searching for.
...
(Ten years later Billy Darley hands his brother a machete and a blessing, and Joe uses it to slash a teenager's throat wide open.)
iv.
Samuel is bright, and absolutely terrified.
Neglect, she's told. Left unsupervised in a trailer park with access to a shotgun and little food. They don't know much else at the moment.
Evelyn's mind has no problem filling in the blanks – it does so happily, in fact; paints many different pictures of varying scenarios, some of which haven't and now never will take place (a child's curiosity splattered across trailer walls, courtesy of a loaded firearm).
Whatever she finds herself expecting (images of Brian's empty gaze flashing through her mind), Samuel is not it. He's short and chubby, wide brown eyes staring up at her from beneath unruly bangs. It's on the tip of her tongue to remark that he looks loved, not neglected, but then she recalls the shotgun and the words die in the back of her throat.
...
He calls her ma'am even after she's told him that 'Evelyn' will do just fine, and sits fidgeting on the living room couch, eyeing the shadows in the corners of the room as if they're about to expand and gobble him up, until she shoos him upstairs to play with the other children.
He spends dinner looking over his shoulder, body tense and ready to spring at the slightest provocation, but he cleans his plate and, when prompted, agrees to seconds. In the soft light of the dining room he looks perfectly normal and healthy, not a scratch on him – such a contrast to the battered and worn children that usually grace Evelyn's doorstep.
He helps to clear the table, though only after seeing everyone else rise to the occasion, and as she watches him she realizes that she was right the first time around: loved and spoiled and terrified of shadows.
It's only after the children have all scrambled upstairs again and she goes to wipe the table off that she discovers that the salt shaker has been completely emptied, its lid now crocked, sloppily screwed on.
...
The next morning she wakes to find a thick layer of tiny white crystals lining the threshold of the front door, as well as all the window sills of the house. The salt scatters beneath her feet as she heads out to pick up the morning paper and when she steps back inside she finds her newest charge standing at the foot of the steps, bare toes curled against the thick carpet and a frown marring his face as he takes in the broken white line at her feet.
It takes a while to go through the house and sweep it all up (the dear boy must have raided her pantry sometime during the night and gotten his hands on the unopened box of salt she keeps there), and once it's done Evelyn can't help but think that maybe she should have left it where it was. Different children have different ways to cope with being uprooted and placed in a strange new home with strange new people: some get ornery, some turn mute and some, as it would seem, play with condiments.
Samuel is the very picture of a cornered animal, tension making his shoulders tremble. He sits curled up on one end of the couch, neck stretched so that he can see out the window without being too close to it. She wonders what it is he's waiting for – is reminded of Michael and the vigils he used to keep, but somehow knows that Samuel is anticipating the arrival of more than a brother. What else she doesn't know, but it's got him running scared.
...
She goes next door to borrow more salt. Normally Mrs. Ramsey would insist that Evelyn stay and have a cup of coffee, but today the widow has a visitor in the shape of a tall, dark haired man sitting at her kitchen table; Evelyn catches a glimpse of his back over Mrs. Ramsey's shoulder as she answers the door.
'He's a reporter,' Mrs. Ramsey claims, all atwitter as she returns from the kitchen to press a box of salt into Evelyn's hands. The man doesn't turn but for a brief moment to throw a glance towards the front door – he looks familiar, even though Evelyn is quite sure she's never encountered him before in her life.
The street outside is empty, save for a sleek black car parked down by the end of the block.
...
Towards the evening, she hands Samuel a bowl of the newly borrowed salt and observes as he goes through what seems like a well practiced routine of trailing white lines across the window sills. Once he's done on the first floor she follows him up the stairs and watches as he repeats the process on the second, carefully drawing an extra salt circle around the bed in his room. Afterward he allows her to tuck him in, small face thin lipped and determined, and she recognizes a reward when she sees one.
...
It's no sound that awakens her, but the feeling that there's an unknown presence in her house. For a moment she flashes back in time and feels the barrel of the gun trace down her cheek, but then she closes her eyes and it is gone. Her bedside clock blinks 2:27 and she slips out of bed and walks down the hallway, stopping outside of Samuel's room.
The door swings open beneath her hand, and even in the dark she can make out the empty bed inside the unbroken ring of salt. The window's open – she can't quite see it, it's too dark, but she can feel the breeze and hear the nighttime sounds of the city filtering inside.
She steps into the room, heart hammering in her chest, and stops short when she hears the creaking of the floorboards at the other side the bedroom. On the street below a car drives by and its headlights cast enough light in through the window for her to, in a split second, clearly see the boy standing by the foot of the bed.
He's not one of hers. There's no doubt about it. Pale in the unnatural light, freckles dusted across the bridge of his nose, he seems almost ghostlike in appearance – Evelyn can find no logical reason for him to be here, in this room, when Samuel is not.
Neither of them move. It's a moment of almost eerie serenity, and Evelyn thinks that she's never known a boy this young to be so very still. He meets her gaze like he has nothing to fear, and she wonders if his heart is beating as wildly as her own is (something tells her it isn't).
And then she blinks, and that is all it takes – the light from the car's headlights fade out, and the boy melts back into the shadows. By the time she's found the light switch to her right he's gone, Samuel with him, like neither of them were ever there to begin with.
...
(Evelyn Mercer doesn't live long enough to see Sam Winchester's face grace the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list.)