Father of Mine: Cry
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Notes: This part was actually written after the fourth part, but I checked the age I had the fourth part set at (ten) and decided I was skipping too many years. Now, I don't know if there is an official age for Jim when his father left, so until I manage to get a copy of the art/making of book (my aunt is supposed to be getting a copy at Barnes & Noble) and check to see, it'll be ten. Having three younger brothers at various ages, I've certainly been acquainted with what each age looks like, and Jim looks ten to me when his father leaves. Then again, he was one heck of an articulate three-year old…^-^
Feedback: Pwease?
Disclaimer: If I owned them…*ominous music* Doesn't matter. Don't own 'em.
Set: Age of seven. The age of getting pounded into the dirt by jerks. *horrible flashbacks*
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I remember blue skies
Walking the block
I loved it when you held me high
I loved to hear you talk…
-Everclear, 'Father of Mine'
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Trudging up the winding steps carved carefully up the plateau was a necessary evil, and he kept his eyes focused on each step in front of him to keep his balance and to avoid tripping. The fierce stinging in the back of his eyes he pretended wasn't there, though had he allowed the tears to come, they would have blended perfectly with the slick wetness already spotting his face, keeping the dirt and red welts noticeable. He dragged his bag behind him, the hollow fabric smacking over the roughly hewn steps and making empty shuffling sounds, and he rubbed the back of his hand under his nose, a breath hitching in his throat. For a moment he struggled with the slight burning in his chest, wanting more than anything to keep the tears and the sobs and the pain inside but hating the pressure rending his lungs, and then he buckled his head forward, a soft keeling noise in the exhaled air.
He climbed another step, slowly, broken gulps and silver crescent tears growing a little more frequent with the passing shifts of fractional daylight, and he wondered if his mother would be angry at him if he tracked mud inside. Glancing at the sky, tears melting away at the blinding daggers of sunlight, he felt his shoulders shaking deeply, strongly, and when he dared to lean his head back down, moving forward up the dusty steps, the lapse of salty moisture started prickling again. Somehow he picked his way up the side, biting his lip hard until it bled in hopes of hiding the shame of weeping, and he wove his numb fingers tighter around his bag's faded strap. Still, the crying came back, bursting past his resolve each time to make him stagger just enough to stop, streaks of sticky cleanliness passing through the dirt rubbed harshly into his cheeks and chin before tickling the skin under his face.
If he had cried at school, it would have been worse. If he had ever, for even the faintest second, let any one of the boys who had taunted and teased him, pushing him into the dirt, see any tears or hear any whimpers, anything they would see as weakness and girly admission, it would have hurt a thousand times more. The few other times he had found himself in the trap, he had always escaped, wriggling free or running to the doors of the building, and he had never let his mother know that he had been mocked.
He had never bled before, either, and he had never been shoved to the ground or tripped into an old, tepid puddle from one of the dark storms. Wiping at his face, pulling his arm into his sleeve to better use it as a makeshift cloth, he paused at the top, staring around at the docks spun out from the plateau's smooth top like the spokes of a large wheel. He looked as he always did for any galleons or schooners, anything that could be holding his father, vainly hoping as he dried his face to look at each empty dock until there none were left to futilely glance toward. The tears did not come now, ashamed hurt replaced inside by a sort of grounding sadness, and he lowered his head, dragging his bag behind him as he crossed the sloping, grassy hill to the door of the Benbow Inn. Passing through a thin puddle, lopsided shoes dampened a little further by the wetness, he lifted his bag and hugged it as he would a shield, hand reaching for the knob on the door.
He twisted and pushed, hesitating at the mouth of the inn as he saw the unusual blankness where normally he would see a crowd of people, and he remembered that the spring festival had opened in the morn. It made the effort of stepping quietly into the inn easier, kicking his shoes off and peeling away his socks to stuff them soaking into the mouths of his abandoned shoes, and he pulled the door as quietly shut as he could, afraid of his mother hearing from wherever she was. He grabbed his shoes, thin fingers spreading almost painfully to hold the leather together as he moved to the stairs, sniffling and swallowing heavily amidst a resolve to hide the clothes before his mother could find any scrap of condemning evidence.
The wood was familiar under his bare feet, a glossy oaken strength that supported his weight with a silent grace, and he turned just slightly, wincing as he saw a few thin puddles on the steps where the droplets kept safe in shoes, away from the sunlight, had collected. But he could explain that away, say he had tracked it in from the puddles out front, and even though he hated lying to his mother, it would be easier than having to tell her what they had said. He tightened his grip on the shoes, shifting uncomfortably in the heavy burden of damp and filthy clothes, and flicked his gaze back up the stairs, taking another sticky step up before his mother appeared at the end of the platform leading from stairs to rooms. Immediately, he headed to go back down, not wanting to have to do anything but hide.
"Jim," she started, busy with a ledger she was flipping through with her usual worried expression over the expenses, "I'll need your help getting some of the rooms clean for tonight, after people start wandering back from the spring-fest, and--"
She looked up, feet stepping smoothly over the floor and obscured by the straight fall of her cotton skirt, and he saw the sort of expression on her face that either meant he was in deep trouble or pirates had attacked a dear personal friend, and as the latter had yet to happen, he figured he was in trouble. Nonetheless, he attempted a smile sorely out of place in his face streaked with tears and dirt and red scrapes, eyes rimmed with a swollen crimson, and said meekly, "Hi, Mom."
"What happened?" was her answering cry, the ledger placed hurriedly on the railing along the platform as she scooped her skirt into one hand and nearly ran around the corner, hurrying as fast as she could down the stairs. He backed a few paces, scrubbing hard at his face in hopes of pretending he hadn't cried, and he noticed he had let his bag drop at some point, but it left his mind quickly. Trying for another weak smile, fingers fidgeting nervously in the dirtied cloth of his trousers, he gasped only slightly when she caught his face squarely in her hands, mild pain arriving where her fingertips brushed the rough scrapes. "Jim, what happened?" she repeated, still worried, but with a hint of serious no-nonsense in her tone.
"Nothing," he said before he thought, boyish pride getting in the way. "Nothing happened, Mom," he added in a quieter voice, one almost apologetic, and he winced as she ruffled his ragged bangs up to study his forehead. Aside from some dark smudges of dirt smeared thickly at an angle with his eyebrows, there were few signs of wear along the skin, and he pulled back a little, not wanting to have to devoid himself of the things he didn't want to guiltily burden her with. It didn't matter what the kids at school said about his father anyway, and besides, he knew she needed little else to worry about, what with the inn and him constantly finding things to get into and then stuck in. "Don't worry," he said almost in a murmur, quelling a bit at her righteous, narrow-eyed look.
"Jim," she stated clearly, "something happened, because I think I would notice if my son came home every day covered in dirt, soaking wet, and bleeding."
"It's not bleeding," he protested, and then, as if to make sure, he touched his cheek tentatively and found that, sure as he had said, he was not bleeding. That was not to say it would not have taken a great deal more pressure to ensure that he would bleed, but in any case he was momentarily relieved to find he was free of any blood. "And some guys were just goofing around anyway," he continued almost obliviously, trailing off when he realized mayhap he was saying the wrong thing.
"What kind of goofing around has you beaten up?" she demanded, gripping his shoulders firmly and marching him up the stairs as he leaned back, surprised, before giving in from his futile last struggle. "Goofing around is when you spit seeds at the girls you like," she persisted nearly angrily, "not when you push other boys around. Weren't the teachers watching you? When did this happen?" She directed him with expertise down the hall and marching up a small set of stairs that led to her room, bringing him straight through the door and across the nigh spotless carpet into the large washroom.
Still hung up on the comments about seeds, girls, and bullying kids, Jim blurted, "But I didn't! I don't hit anybody, Mom," he looked at her anxiously, "and 'sides, girls got weird cooties anyway." He was sidetracked for a moment, caught in the disgusting idea of any girl being liked, and he grimaced, shoulders quivering a little with the force of his horror as she let go of his shoulders and reached for the towel by the washbasin.
"Jim," she said softly, "what happened?" The towel was wettened quickly, the pitcher by the washbasin overturned to spill water onto the absorbent cloth, and she wrung it swiftly between two heat-calloused hands, shaking the towel out and dabbing it to his face. He jerked back in response, the cool droplets stinging the superficial red spots on his face, and she captured his chin in her hand, bent over and keeping him still as she carefully passed the cloth along the rounded contours. "I'm your mother. Can't you please just tell me?" Her voice was a lulling softness, pitched low and gentle to keep him from any inexplicable childish upsetting, and she pressed her fingers, swathed in the cloth, closer to his face in order to peel away a stubborn clod of dried mud.
"It was stupid," he said, voice muffled by the cloth passing over his mouth and rubbing away a layer of dirt to expose a faint scratch on his lower lip. "They're stupid. 'S'not important anyway. It's not like they hurt me anyway." As soon as the words had left his mouth, the instant the cloth had moved up to clean his other cheek, he knew it was one of the worst things he could have said, her face clouding over and her lips thinning in a way that foretold either a lecture or something else he was confident he wouldn't like.
"I have," she replied calmly, her voice nonetheless verging on a darker tone, "a seven-year old son standing in the middle of my washroom, covered in dirt and with scrapes all over his face. Jim, how is that not getting hurt? How is them, whoever they are because you won't tell me, shoving you around not hurting you? What did they do?"
"Nothing," he cried, wanting to glare but not being able to. "They didn't do nothing, Mom! I'm fine. We were just playing and I got shoved into something, but they didn't mean to. It was an as-dee," he stumbled over the word, not knowing how to say it, and lapsed into a miserable silence while she swept the dirt whispered over his forehead away with a smooth flick of her hand.
"An accident?" she suggested quietly and he nodded silently, blinking his eyes hard at the returning stickers that were sharpened teardrops. "Jim," she sighed heavily, "an accident is when you forget to do your homework, not when you come home from school needing two baths and an entire box of bandages." She leaned slightly back, straightening her hips just so, and she studied his face with the critical, omnipotent eye of a practiced mother, pausing before she asked again, gently, "What did they do, Jim?" After he refused to meet her eyes, focusing his own sea-shaded jewels on the wall just over her shoulder, she breathed out quietly, disappointed and hurting for her son, and pushed the cloth over the thin lining counter into the waiting basin. "What did they say, Jim?"
He looked her in the eyes, then, a startled shiver in his features as though he still could not place how his mother could time and time again whittle it down to the core of the problem, and bit his lip, sucking on it as he tried to think of a way out of answering.
"Jim," she repeated, almost warningly, cupping his chin firmly in her hands, and he blinked harder than before.
"They said Dad was a no-good skippin' loser and that he hated me," he finally answered, voice dipping into a whisper. "That I was too stupid an' weird for anybody to love me, and that he kept leaving because he didn't want me around."
It surprised him, then, to see his mother crying, her face wrinkling and eyes tilting with the curve of her eyebrows, and he didn't want to cry, either, but he felt helpless, completely without control seeing the same broken expression on her face that he had felt all day. They were quiet tears first, a silent shimmer that swept down her cheeks in slow, deliberate trickles, and then the first ripped sob came from her lips, scaring him with the depth of foreign emotion that he nearly recognized but fell short of knowing. She sank, crippled to her knees, and she was at eye level with him, her hands moving to his shoulders and pulling him roughly, lovingly, into a hug that somehow frightened him even further with the way that it seemed to tell him some secret she had yet to voice.
He didn't know how to stop his mother from crying; she was supposed to stop him from crying. It was how it had always been, and now she was the one crying, hugging him like he was a lifeline, and it scared him so that he was crying and holding her, wanting to pretend the entire day hadn't happened.
"I'm so tired of this, Jim," she said, pulling away as she continued crying, moving back enough that he was, for the first time, taller than her. "I'm tired of your father being gone and me having to run the Benbow on my own, and having to make sure everything runs well enough that we have the money to keep living and paying for everything," he remembered the ledger, the anxious face she wore habitually whenever she went over the numbers just one more time with a carefully inked pen nub in hopes that a number had been added wrong or that maybe this one thing hadn't cost as much, "and I'm just so tired. I can't do this all on my own, anymore, and I don't know how I've even gotten this far." She took her hands from his shoulders, covering her face with them as though to hide from view the glimmering traces painting her cheeks, the gentle, feminine curves of her strong and true features, and he flexed his fingers hesitantly.
"I lied, Mom," he forced out, quickly wiping at his cleaned, teary face to take from his skin the staining, salted water. "None of the guys said that at school." He tried a smile, wearing it uncomfortably as he would shoes five sizes too small, and said in a helpless voice, "It was a stupid joke, Mom. Nobody did that. It's all a lie, see?" And that was easier to say than watching his mother cry.
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He had stayed in his room for the rest of the evening, eating a voiceless meal with his mother picking at the food she had on her plate without taking a single bite, rearranging the careful design on the porcelain into a dead mess of swirled colors and faded texture. It was delicious, he knew that in the back of his head, but he found no taste in the lumpy bites he chewed and forced down his throat around the knot that seemed to have adopted some form of temporary residence there. It was bland to his mind, a pallet of food that was empty and far from filling, and he continued eating until a wave of overstuffed nausea struck him, reminding him that even though he couldn't tell anymore when to stop, there was still a place to stop at.
Rubbing his knuckles over the sheets of his bed, kneeling by the bed on his knees and resting the side of his head on the crisp fabric, he whispered, "God, please help." That was all he could say, a succinct plea for help from the last person he could turn to, and he closed his eyes, mouthing an appropriately proper ending for the quick prayer. Nothing else was made known to be done, and he wrapped his arms around his head, trying to hide his face in the crook of his elbow where the pajamas were warm and dark, engulfing and swallowing with their brief annihilation of all he had previously seen around him.
"Jim?" he heard his mother saying with a bright tone in her voice and he lifted his head quickly, scrubbing his sleeves painfully across his face, over the scratches and sore spots as he clambered into his bed. "The postman just came to our door," she smiled at him, at her boy spreading his legs flat in a display of misery and innocence. "He was a little late because of the festival," she continued carefully, and he smiled cautiously back at her, not seeing any of the scary sadness of earlier, "and he apologized several times, but he brought this for you." She handed to him a large book, a pebbled surface bound in an older style, the kinds that had preceded the more modern stylistics used for school books, and uneven pages kept locked tightly within the covers, and he took it with a soft, surprised sound.
Jim studied the cover, curious, and he shifted around in his bed, legs falling over the side and bouncing as she sat carefully beside him, a secretive smile on her lips. "'Mechanics,'" he started, reading slowly and looking up to her for encouragement; she nodded and, leaning closer to his head, pointed a gentle finger to the continuing title scripted in an elegant handyman's writing. "'Mechanics,'" he repeated, wriggling and sitting straighter with the sudden self-importance of reading it to her, "'and Building a Proper Surfer.'" Puzzled, he stared blankly at it, the words bringing a faint recognition to his mind, and he glanced quizzically once more at his lovely mother, earning a soft smile and a beckoning movement of her hand that eagerly asked him to open it.
He shrugged and pried the cover open, his eyes widening at the explosion of light, the delicate construct of metal and photosensitive canvas arching out to greet him as it came from the page, a friendly masculine voice intoning the same words he had just read from the cover. "Your father sent this for you to have," she said in the corner of his hearing, smile reflecting in her voice, and he held a hand out to the untouchable object swirling above the pages amidst the shafts of gold and enticing edges.
"Wow," he breathed.
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End Notes: I'm probably going to load the next part unedited (with the original age of ten in it). I'm going to Egypt this coming Sunday, with my family, to visit my dad (he's an air force pilot and whatnot), and I'll have it loaded by Friday of this week. As soon as I find out the truth, I'll edit the chapter where need be and repost it. ^-^ I will be posting in Egypt, but not for about a week (during which I'll be adjusting to jetlag, feminine inferiority, and writing myself senseless).
Added Note: Narf! Right, well, thank God I managed to figure out the official shtuff before I posted the next part. Eight years, Leland, got it. I'm still tweaking a few things (like having Leland's job changed a little – more on that next part), but forgive me? I'm currently editing the next part, trying to see if I need to change the way Jim speaks (ten and eight have marginal differences in yakkin', but, geez…). Be forewarned that the next chap has lots of pointless description – I wrote it a while ago, and a mechanic friend of mine thought the opening was hilarious ("You're pulling this out of your ear, aren't you?" as he put it), so I'm keeping it. Jerk.
Thanks: Celeste Rose, twice, and Silver will undoubtedly appear later in the fic (currently, I think after about three or four more parts). Unable To Cry, I got the same sort of reaction from my best friend, the sadness thing (and then was informed if I didn't have a happy ending, she would smack me harder than norm). Team Bonet, it wasn't harsh at all, and the comments were very welcome. I think I've kept the description as in check in this part as I could – and I think the second part was a bit sweeter than the first to counterbalance. ^-^; Tigrin, I've wanted to use 'Father of Mine' in a songfic for well over a year and, in a depressing way, when I saw TP for the first time, I realized I had found the one character that could actually fit the song. I finally have proof that all those Doctor Suess books have infiltrated my unconscious mind…Fani Lirui, love your name, by the way. ^-^ And I was planning a teenage Jim chapter (a couple, actually), pre-Legacy, so that works out, no? ;]
Ah! But it means a great deal that you all have taken the time to comment on my story, and I hope you continue to enjoy – sort of. ^-^ Have a wonderful summer!