My entry to the 2021 TAG Mini Bang! My creative partner, birdie-puff, did a truly breathtaking piece of art for this story, and I'm delighted by the result.
Letting Go is a sequel to Holding On and is part two in the vive memor leti series.
Ice chimes against crystal as Jeff carries two glasses and a bottle of scotch through the villa, as summoned by his eldest. The unusual nature of the request has lodged itself like a hook in Jeff's breastbone, and so he follows its tugs, helpless to resist.
Scott's door is almost shut, unusual for him, so Jeff pauses at the threshold, taps knuckles to wood. Some boundaries aren't to be crossed unacknowledged by the light of day. "Son?"
Almost lost to the walls of soundproofing between them comes a faint, "Out here."
The balcony, then.
He nudges the door aside, careful to avoid knocking the bottle, then steps through his eldest's suite, predictably tidy at a glance, although, as glimpsed through the bedroom doorway, the bedcovers aren't quite smooth, appearing drawn hastily into place. A common enough sight across the villa, considering they're often dragged from sleep to rescue and back again. Bed-to-door footpaths are kept immaculate, if nothing else, although some members of the household didn't adopt these habits as rapidly as others.
Thunderbird One touched down more than two hours ago, but Jeff still catches a whiff of woodsy, moisture-heavy air as he walks to the balcony, and sure enough, Scott's head, turned toward the doorway, is still closer to black than brown, darkened by retained water, even as the first traces of pink haze the sky. It's going to be a beautiful night.
"There you are," Jeff says, less because he had to hunt him down and more to test the waters; he did, after all, see the look on Scott's face when he returned from his latest mission, a solo excursion into the heart of South America to outrace a deluge and its offspring flash flood, killers both, but less so than predicted due to the heroics of International Rescue.
It's not the first time one of his sons has been unable to save lives, and it won't be the last. The losses always weigh on them, and Jeff is prepared to take the necessary steps if he notices anyone attempting to shirk the grieving process, but this—this is something else. Something other, something he recognizes but typically doesn't have to confront during the waking hours. The disruption of a long-held pattern is concerning—or perhaps, secretly, cause for a flickering hope, somewhere deep beneath that tugging hook.
Scott shrugs and glances at the sky without quite taking his attention off Jeff, as though monitoring him to see what he'll do next. "Needed some fresh air."
Understandable, so Jeff nods and raises the glasses slightly, ice cubes tapping one another as they slide around in puddles of their own making. "You want?"
"Please." Scott accepts one of the filled glasses and knocks its contents back like it's fifty dollars' worth of scotch, not five hundred fifty, then holds the cut crystal out and sighs when Jeff eyes him. "That was sixty percent water and you know it."
Indeed he does, so he refills Scott's glass and is moderately reassured when he swirls it around briefly before lifting it again, this time to sip, an appropriate way to treat the drink considering the year on the bottle. For himself, Jeff drains the melted ice first so he won't have the same problem, then sets the bottle on the small table just behind them before joining Scott in leaning against the railing, leaving a careful foot and a half between their elbows as they gaze across the island sprawled below them. Palm fronds rustle in the ever-present seafront breeze, birds and bugs doing their best to out-trill one another. On particularly tiresome nights, the noise is almost deafening, but tonight it's steady, already fading into the background.
Surprising in its own way, Scott is the first to break the relative silence. "Virgil and Alan still out?"
"Mhm. Ferrying the last of the injured from the tornado to available hospitals, apparently."
"And you aren't overseeing them?"
"It's just cleanup now. John's keeping an eye on them."
Scott lifts his glass again and makes a noncommittal sound into it even as his gaze wanders in the direction where half his brothers are working hard to save lives. "I should join them," he says with an idleness that wouldn't normally become him but currently signifies he knows he won't be leaving to help, not when they're so close to packing up and returning home.
"You should probably catch some shuteye so you're ready for the next callout."
"Probably," Scott says without any underlying agreement, and only because Jeff's looking for it does he see the way Scott's shoulders fold ever so slightly around the glass cradled between his palms. Above them, the sky is ribboned with reds, pinks, oranges, vibrant enough as to be violent, and from this angle, Scott's bowed head appears streaked with blood.
Jeff pushes his sons hard. He knows this, has been told so by his mother, by Kyrano, by teachers and coaches and instructors, by his sons themselves, sometimes in fits of pique and sometimes in gratitude. He has, occasionally, pushed them too hard, demanded too much, seen forward into their potential and ignored the very real, very human limitations staring him in the face. He likes to think he's learned how to more accurately judge his sons' emotional states based off even small indications, and everything about Scott right now says that he's brittle, like old plastic left for too long under the sun. Mishandle him and he'll shatter, so Jeff sips from his own, exceptional drink and wonders—about what's bothering Scott, about whether his other sons will return home safe, about whether he'll have to stay up tonight under the guise of working or whether he'll be able to fall into bed at a decent hour for once.
Beside him, Scott slowly tips his glass back and forth a few times before draining it. Once done, he doesn't imply he wants a refill and instead balances the glass on the railing, a strip of metal just narrow enough that Jeff makes a note not to bump it even though it was designed to withstand rockets and ramjets. Maybe a particularly stiff breeze could knock the glass off, though—could send it plummeting to dash apart on the poured concrete below.
Jeff plucks the glass from the railing and studies it for a moment, so strong but so delicate, before holding it up. "More?"
Scott hesitates, then shakes his head. "Shouldn't."
"You're on mandatory downtime anyway," he replies, an observation and maybe also testing the waters a bit.
"I'm pretty sure you shouldn't be encouraging me to go blackout."
Jeff hides his frown behind the lip of his own glass. "Is that why you called me out here?"
"No. No, that'd be a waste of your vintage collection."
Somehow this doesn't alleviate his concern. "But not the standard one?"
Scott scoffs and runs a hand through his hair before bracing his elbows on the railing. "Tempting but—no."
Jeff sets Scott's empty glass on the table, and his own swiftly follows; shards of ice clink about in both, stubbornly resistant to the island's natural temperatures, high even this late in the day. "Do you want to tell me what this is, then?"
Even though Jeff tries to strip as much judgment as possible out of the question, Scott's shoulders still hunch further and he turns his head away, until Jeff can only see the corner of his jaw, taut between its occasional flexing.
"If you don't, that's okay too," Jeff says, belatedly, instructions sparking to reluctant life in his brain about giving trauma victims choices. He didn't claw his way to world's richest individual by spending time mollycoddling people through difficult circumstances, but his sons are important to him, more than ever now considering what they do, and so he's learned. Maybe not as well as he should have, maybe not as soon, but he's trying.
It's..." Scott audibly swallows, but his voice is still thick with the cloy of memory when he continues. "It's an anniversary."
"An anniversary," he repeats, slowly. Not of Scott's return to the States, not of his final debacle of a tour even though it extended far beyond the scheduled date. Not of a family event of any sort, and not of International Rescue's founding or any of their biggest rescues, publicly or personally. "Anniversary of what?"
Scott shakes his head and turns to the table, but once his glass is full again, he merely stares into its depths, as though the amber liquid will part ways and reveal the path to long-lost answers. Jeff wants to tell him even the most expensive scotch in the world doesn't have the answers he seeks, but there are some lessons everyone has to learn for themselves. Privately, he's grateful this has never been Scott's vice of choice, and he hopes he isn't watching him begin to spiral down that path before his eyes.
He's halfway through debating the merits of taking the bottle and leaving so as not to encourage this behavior when Scott releases a sharp breath and looks up at the sky, now laced with delicate shades of purple; instead of blood in his hair, he seems to be wearing bruises under his skin, leaving him wan and exhausted, and his voice is equally quiet when he speaks. "I don't think I've ever thanked you."
Apparently Jeff isn't getting an answer to his query about the anniversary. It's going to eat at him later if that persists; right now he tucks the thought aside so he can focus on yet another unforeseen twist in this evening's conversation. "For what?"
"For being honest about how IR would be run and what I'd need to do to remain an active member. I'm not sure if I'd continued working on things if I hadn't had that incentive."
"I know you would—" Jeff stops, reconfigures his approach because he has no right to tell Scott what he should believe about himself, not anymore. "Do you really think so?"
Scott shrugs, swallows another mouthful, looks into the deepening indigo of the nighttime sky, taps his fingers on his glass—delaying tactics, all, and Jeff can't quite tell whether it's because he doesn't want to answer or because he's thinking. Perhaps both. In lieu of pressuring him into speaking, he retrieves his own glass, drains the tepid, watery remains of his ice so he can savor the liquor in full.
"Maybe not," Scott finally admits, slowly, selecting each word with care, "but I—without it, I was—I would've made a terrible decision today, and—yeah. This is a step forward, for me, even though it doesn't... So. I'm grateful, or I will be, at least, when I'm—when things are better." He looks down at the glass clutched in his hand, white knuckled and not quite steady, and his voice quietens, hushed with the weight of admittance. "I'm... going to need a day or two off, I think."
There's so much left unspoken, so much Jeff wants to ask about, but Scott's shifting his weight from foot to foot, restless and showing signs of an anxiety he typically does his best to master, and Jeff knows not to push, not now. Instead, he reaches out, slow and steady and predictable, places his hand on Scott's shoulder, waits to see whether he'll be shrugged off. Scott tenses for a long moment, then exhales a long breath, and even though he doesn't quite relax, he shows no signs of pulling away.
"Son. Obviously you don't have to tell me what's happened, now or later or at all. You're here to make these decisions, and for that, I'm more thankful than I know how to adequately express. You're never a burden"—because he knows how Scott feels about that, as alike as they are—"and I'm glad you're here to celebrate this anniversary—acknowledge it, rather."
With halting movements, Scott rests his hand on Jeff's, giving it a brief squeeze before slipping out from beneath the touch; Jeff considers himself wise enough not to pursue. "Maybe one day it'll actually be a celebration." The bitter, self-recriminating edge to his voice eases a little when he adds, "But—thanks." After a few moments, he huffs and drains his glass before offering it to Jeff, something self-conscious in the gesture. "I probably need to sleep."
It's a dismissal, if a gentle one, so Jeff nods and accepts the glass, then steps back so he can collect the bottle. "Good night, Scott."
"Good night, Dad."
At the doorway to the suite, Jeff pauses, plagued by words he knows he should say; that he has to swallow the last of his own drink first perhaps is an indication that he needs to follow his son's example in the pursuit of bettering himself. "Scott?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm proud of you. For everything. For—for whatever not-terrible decision you made today."
Scott doesn't turn to face him, the tension in his shoulders a brief here-and-gone, but his voice bleeds a hesitant relief, the weight of anticipated judgment easing away, when he says, "Thank you."
Jeff leaves Scott standing there, a shadowy figure slowly being swallowed by the night as darkness blankets the island. The hook in his sternum hasn't dislodged, might be wedged firmer than ever now, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. His sons are adults in their own rights, he trusts they can handle whatever obstacles they come up against, but that doesn't mean he's been rendered obsolete. His understanding, praise, acceptance—their value is greater than he typically prefers to assign, such easy things to cast aside as unnecessary amid the myriad other responsibilities of life. That it takes quiet, heavy conversations around his best scotch, the bottle now several thousand dollars lighter, to remind him of what's truly important makes his chest feel too small, the crushed unimportant giving way to the imperative.
Crystal chimes against crystal as he walks down the hall, back to the main lounge, the sight of Scott folded over the railing hanging like a stone in his mind. Jeff won't sleep tonight, but that's okay—he'll welcome Virgil and Alan back home, ensure they're doing well, then retire to the small office in the personal wing, maybe with a final glass he can nurse into the small hours of the morning, when he might be needed again. If he isn't, then he'll be tired but relieved, and the dawn will rise on what will become an anniversary of his own to celebrate as Scott takes a definitive step away from the clinging shadows of the past.
