Bonus - Week 14 - UDC 10 - Wherein Alan makes Pete at least write about it, weather he wants to or not...

Vertex

When Alan pulled up to the Bradshaw residence, Walt was standing by his car in the driveway, talking to Nick with a serious expression on his face. He couldn't see Nick's face, but he could guess from the body language as well as the phone call that Frank had fielded earlier. "Wait here." Mike simply nodded, and Alan got out, taking a tablet and a pen with him.

He noticed Helen watching from the front door and motioned to her where the other one was, and she motioned inside, pantomiming homework. Alan nodded and waited for Walt to look up. It took a few minutes, and Walt dragging Nick into a hug, and then he was frowning over Nick's shoulder at him. "Alan's here, Nick."

Nick seemed to freeze, and then he spun in Walt's grasp. "Oh. Hi. Dad was just explaining... and I'm sorry for calling like that, just..."

"You don't have to explain," Alan told him, then motioned to the car. "Look after Mike while I go in there and get Pete to write down whatever this flashback was, hmmm? He's had a weird day or so getting his head around all of this, and Nora was a friend."

Nick frowned, then looked beyond him at the car and it's passenger. "So..."

"That would be Viper," Walt explained. "You here to evaluate Pete before we actually do dinner tomorrow?"

"That I am." Alan nudged Nick on the shoulder as he passed him. "Good job, by the way."

"For what?"

"Getting my attention in the middle of all this." Alan nodded back at the car. "That guy? Pretty sure Walt told you, but it's a lot to take in."

Nick nodded slowly. "Grand gestures, remember? If I don't get to do it, neither do you without a really good explanation."

Alan nodded. "Thank you. How's he doing today?"

Nick glanced back toward the house. "Today? Closer to normal for him, less curtain-like. He mentioned an officer talking to his mother, Mr. Jenkins, even if he doesn't admit to remembering all of what was said."

"I can work with less curtain-like, and I wouldn't expect him to."

Parallax

Someone joined him at the table and Pete looked up to find Alan sitting there instead of Nick. He stared at him for a long moment, frowning. "This is Thursday."

Alan nodded. "That, it is. Helen, would you join us?" She did, pulling one of the other chairs closer and sitting down. "Now... I know this is odd and breaks routine, Pete, but there won't be time tomorrow, so we're going to do your standing appointment right now instead. All right?"

Pete continued to frown. "Sure. I'm fin-"

"Are you?" Alan interrupted, eyes glinting in a such a way that caused Pete to blink as he laid the notepad down and took the textbooks away, setting them aside. "You know how this works."

Pete stared at the note pad, then shoved it back at him. "No. I don't want to write about it, and I don't want to talk about it."

"Alan?" Helen asked. "Does he..." She paused when he raised a hand to silence her without breaking eye contact.

"Talking about things like this makes it real," Alan explained, his tone softened slightly. "And yes, he does need to, because there is a path to wellness and getting things into the light and out in the open is the way here, even if it hurts in the telling. So... what happened back there, Pete?" He slid the notepad back. "Tell the notepad."

Syzygy

Helen hadn't expected Pete to comply after refusing once, but once he started writing, he didn't stop for fifteen minutes of total silence. She wanted to reach out, to hand him a Kleenex for the tears he was shedding, but Alan's stony expression stopped her, so she checked on Walt and Nick out at the curb, talking to a... was that Mike? The confusion she felt must have shown, for Alan got her attention quietly and motioned to Pete. She blinked, suddenly realizing that he was trying for a certain outcome, prepared for anything.

"Here," Pete suddenly said, sliding the notepad back over. "Mom took it hard, and two or three days later, she was in the hospital. I think. I could be remembering that wrong."

Alan slid the notepad over to her and the question of what she'd taken hard was answered. Pete had overheard the officer telling his mother the official story, that his father had abandoned them with a stolen F-4. "Pete?"

"I don't believe it," Pete said immediately. "Didn't know what the words meant then, but... do we have to talk about it?"

"No," Alan told him after a minute of reading. "This was enough. You feel up to an eval?"

"No."

"Going to do one anyway."

As she listened to Alan ask a bunch of standard questions, she marveled at how the routine of it seemed to settle the boy down after letting so much emotion out on paper. Maybe that was the point of it, to gauge how he was on the day and do exactly that...