Chapter Eight
"We fear that Elizabeth may have suffered memory loss and possible brain damage."
Time stopped. The world stood still.
At least for the inhabitants of Dr. John Mulrow, Ph.D's office.
Unable to bear meeting the shell-shocked eyes before him, John's gaze fell to his hands, still clenching a record sheet. He slowly let it go, smoothing it out with a careless palm before setting it aside. Crossing his feet underneath his desk, the young doctor sought the courage to look up at his guests.
But even as he deliberated, a strong pair of hands grabbed John's overcoat and wrenched him from his leather chair. The chair spun to the side and John looked up barely in time to see Jason's face before his back was slammed up against the window.
He heard Monica scream, heard Alan yell, heard AJ's chair fall to the ground, but none of it registered. All John saw were the intense, blazing, fiery eyes before him. Erie. Haunting. Enraged.
Paralyzing.
Wind knocked out of him, the young man could barely hold a thought as he stared into the furious eyes inches from his face. The strong hands had long fisted in his overcoat, wrinkling his sky blue Hilfiger shirt and lifting John's feet an easy three inches from the ground. His slender reading glasses had slipped from his nose somewhere during the melee and lay somewhere nearby.
"Take it back."
The low growl barely registered in John's startled mind, and he struggled to decide if he had actually heard it.
"E-excuse me?" The words were a whisper, alarmingly sympathetic in the given situation.
"You heard me. Take it back, you bastard!"
He heard the words clearly this time, and as he tried to come up with something – anything – to say, he saw AJ and Alan's hands on Jason's shoulders and abdomen, wrenching the mobster away and forcing him to relinquish his hold on John's coat.
He slipped to the floor, stumbling for a moment until he regained his footing. Bewildered, he swept a hand through his tousled brown hair, deftly searching the green carpet for his spectacles. Finding them, he bent and retrieved the glasses. With trembling hands, he folded them neatly and dropped them into his breast pocket.
Blood rushed up into his face, swirling forcefully in his head and creating a nauseating sensation of weakness. He was certain his face was bright red, but he was uncharacteristically beyond caring. Barely able to hear anything around him as his head roared, John placed a pale hand to his eyes, another one grasping his desk for much-needed support.
Anger surged through Jason's body, coursing through his veins at a breakneck speed as he watched the doctor. Even as his brother and father struggled to restrain him, he kicked and swung with all his might, determined to break loose.
"What the fuck do you mean, brain damaged?" he yelled, his voice booming and unchecked, full of anguish and disbelief. "What type of quack are you? Did you even try to do anything for her? Did you even try?"
John's head snapped up. He had quickly regained his composure and his eyes, although still weary, blazed. Pursing his lips, he resolved not to fan Jason's fire, knowing the mobster wasn't receptive to any explanation he offered.
"You heard me, pansy ass," Jason growled even as his mother stepped in front of him. "And you call yourself a fucking doctor."
"Jason-" John tried, stepping forward with his hand extended in an unspoken plea.
"Fuck you!" Jason roared, wrenching free of Alan and AJ. Monica stepped before him, placing both hands on his chest in an attempt to stop him from advancing on John.
"Jason, please," she started, stepping quickly to keep him at bay.
"No," he spit out, speaking directly to her instead of raging at John. "No – don't even-" He wobbled slightly, as if hit by a sudden but fleeting wave of vertigo.
"Jason," his father tried, spying an opportunity to get a word in. Watching the scene unfold before him and unable to come up with anything to say or do, AJ stepped away from his brother, careful not to touch him in any way, even accidental. He was certain that he was the last person Jason wanted to hear anything from, and knew that he was asking for a beating if he tried.
Jason's stomach rolled as he fought to keep his balance. The walls seemed to close around him, inviting his first assault of claustrophobia. Monica, Alan, and AJ surrounded him and he suddenly found it hard to breathe. His father and Monica's arms were outstretched as if they meant to catch him if he teetered off his feet, but the visual image of them was even more dizzying for him.
The room spun; its inhabitants spun in another direction. Despite the dull roar in his ears, he could make out two words: brain damaged. Brain damaged. Brain damaged.
Brain damaged.
It couldn't be, he thought, choking down a sob. It just couldn't. It couldn't it couldn't it couldn't.
"Jason," Monica's voice was low and strained in an attempt to be soothing as she tried to hide her own grief. Her son's was more powerful and more important at the moment. "Honey, please, you're- you're making yourself sick. Honey, please-"
"Jason." Alan's voice assaulted him from the other side. "Jason, believe us, we understand the pain you're in…"
AJ stood his ground, his feet firmly planted to the floor as his hands drew up into tightly balled fists. I'm here if you need me, Jason, he thought to himself. I know you won't let me near, and I know why. I'd do the same in your place. I'm here all the same, but I won't come forward unless you need me to. You need your space, your time; take it. But know that we're all here.
Past feuds and grudges seemed to melt away according the times, he reflected. Gone was the pain, the anger, the resentment that had tainted his family's relationships with one another for decades past. The only thing here, the only thing real was the grief that was overpowering the same room. He'd do all he could for his younger brother; he knew that now. Just like he did when their mother was diagnosed with cancer; all the bitterness that seemed to color, to define each of them melted just that quickly when they really needed each other.
And even though he wouldn't admit it to anyone, AJ cherished those times. As tragic and terrifying as his mother's illness was, AJ treasured those moments his family had spent together at that time. Treasured how they all banded together to face off the newest foe, the newest adversary that threatened all of them. Not just threatened ELQ, nor the custody of the Quartermaine heir, but the enemy that threatened all of them. The family.
And he knew now, at this horrifying time with the family's two most treasured daughters in grave peril, they would all band together once more. And it was through that sense of unity and commitment that they'd make it through.
They just had to make it through.
John watched the three Quartermaines and the Morgan before him. His breathing and heart rate normal once more, John pondered over his deliverance of the news.
Could he have eased it some in its severity? Was it right to just come out with it? Could he have warned them in any way?
As the questions raced through his head, his caramel eyes found Jason. The once formidable, daunting mobster he had once dreaded meeting was now reduced to…a man. The man he most likely should have been able to see all along.
He had heard that Jason Morgan, the Quartermaine rebel of almost eight years now, was a cold, unfeeling robot. A machine. A Borg, in accordance with the town's nickname for the hardened career criminal. He had heard that the man had once assaulted Edward in his own living room, that he had once almost shot his brother in a dark alley, as well as thousands of other stories he saw in retrospect to be fabrications.
Anyone who said that Jason Morgan was an unfeeling, hardened criminal was as brain damaged as the town proclaimed he was.
His sympathetic eyes raked over Jason's posture. Shoulders slumped, the heels of his hands pressed at his brows in a futile attempt to beat back the unrelenting vertigo, John had rarely seen any man look so…vulnerable. Beaten. Destroyed.
He knew why Jason had slammed him up against his window; understood it as the mobster's primary outlet for showing grief or pain. Men like him, men of power and consequence, knew few other ways of showing grief.
His father was like that, so John had little trouble understanding why Jason was. Growing up as the son of a Chicago Police Commissioner, John understood violence and pain better than most of his colleagues. There were nights when his father would come home and fling the first item he touched across the room. Nights that he'd bellow and rage and spew fire for the smallest of offenses, such as his youngest sister's Barbie dolls left on the stairs, or his Batman roller skates accidentally left on his mother's white tiles.
Those were the nights that he and his two younger sisters would flee to his room, and he'd read Dr. Seuss books to them in a booming voice, trying to shield them from his father's yelling on the floor below.
Did he understand why he had been slammed up against the window? Yeah.
Did he understand why Jason was so upset? Hell, yeah.
And yet even after all his communication classes during the brief period during which he decided he wanted to be a diplomat, John Mulrow could come up with nothing to say.
And perhaps it was better that way, he decided, sinking wearily into his trusty chair. This was for the family to deal with. And no matter how much he admired and cared for the Quartermaines, he wasn't family. And it wasn't his place to help them through their grief; they'd only be able to do that on their own.
Jason's head spun as his mother and father spoke. None of it made sense; nothing made sense anymore. Nothing would ever make sense again if this were true.
"Oh, sweetheart, things will make sense again," his mother assured him brokenly, and Jason realized that he had been repeating his thoughts aloud. "They will, Jason. Everything will be fine; we'll make it fine. Things have a way of working out."
"No," he whispered raggedly. "You can't say that. None of you can say that," he stated flatly, pointing a trembling finger around the room. "That's fine when you lose your job or make a mistake, but it's not fine now."
Seeing his father open his mouth with well-meaning words of protest, Jason preemptively cut him off. "It's not. Saying 'everything will be fine' won't fix this. Don't you see? It can't! Nothing can fix this!"
He wobbled once more, his anxious eyes traveling from face to face. He saw the grief in his parents' eyes, the anguish in AJ's, even the sympathy and understanding in John's. But he wanted none of it.
"Nothing can fix this!" he repeated once more, his voice louder and angrier, the words spilling out rapidly, one after the other. "She won't be 'fixed' just because we convince ourselves that she will, or even if we promise ourselves we won't make the same mistakes. Don't you get it? She won't be fixed, period!"
"Jason, don't say that!" Monica yelled, her eyes glittering with unshed tears. "You have no right to say that! Who do you think you are? Who are you to say she won't? Who are you to steal our hopes?"
He reeled to face her. "Steal your hopes, Monica?" he repeated, incredulous. "Is that what I'm doing?"
Monica set her lips, refusing to back down. "We can hope and we can pray," she repeated firmly. "No one should ever be able to convince us that she won't be fine one day."
He shook his head, unable to believe his ears. She was totally missing the point. "Don't you get it!" he yelled, his hands fisted. "No, no, of course you don't. You never do." He spun slowly, glaring icily at all three of them. "You just can't, and you never will." The words were bitter and accusing.
Alan stepped forward. "Don't talk to your mo-"
"Face it," Jason growled, his eyes hard and cold. "She's not going to wake up one day and just be fixed, no matter how much you want her to; no matter how much you hope or pray."
"Jason-" Monica's voice found him, cold and harsh in her fresh grief.
"No," he shook his head, backing slowly away from the group. His legs wobbled but he managed to keep his footing. "Don't you get it?" His voice dropped to a whisper, ragged and broken, each word wrenched deep from within him. "Don't you understand? Why can't you understand?"
AJ finally moved forward, his arms now outstretched, fearing that his brother might tip over at any minute. His brows were drawn together as the meaning of Jason's tirade hit him. "Jason-"
Jason didn't hear him, didn't see him, didn't feel anything as his knees gave out beneath him. He fell to the floor, his hand falling on the smooth, cool leather of the tan couch. His head fell forward, his other hand limp on his thigh.
"I'm the one that's supposed to be brain damaged. Me. You tried so hard to fix me. It never worked." His blue eyes lifted to meet the comprehending ones of his parents and brother. "I'm the brain damaged one. I'm the one that's dim-witted, half-baked, 'not in full possession of my faculties'. Not her."
He swallowed a sob, its force making his shoulders quiver. "It never should have had to be her."