I do not own "Warrior." It belongs to director Gavin O'Connor.

At long last, I'm returning to the strife and complicated relationships between the three Conlon men. Because really, Brendan needs to come back into Tommy's life. He's just too good of a brother to push away forever.

And yes, I know it's fourteen years between the time Brendan and Tommy became estranged and SPARTA. I started writing this shortly after watching the film and for some reason thought I'd heard 'sixteen years' and started writing it as such. I feel that if I was initially incorrect, I may as well be consistent, except with Brendan's daughters's names and the fact that I was just stupid enough to initially write Tommy as having his right shoulder dislocated instead of his left. That I will absolutely change.

Chapter Fifteen: Brendan

Tommy may not remember Paddy's birthday, but he doubts he'll ever forget Brendan's. They'd been close. Being only two years apart in age and sharing most of the same hopes and fears will do that. He'd always felt as though his defense-never-offense older brother was the sanest one out of them and definitely the brighter of the two of them. He'd been something of a role model. It had made his betrayal all the more painful. Hearing, "I'm not going with you," and not being able to change those words no matter how much he tried to tell his older brother that blood is thicker than water, there are tons of other girls out there but only one mother and only one brother, is something he's kept close to him all these years.

But that was when they were fourteen and sixteen. Now Brendan's turning thirty-three next week. And he knows, knows without any doubt; that he needs to talk to his brother again.

F

Paddy knows this is probably a stupid idea, a really stupid idea, but he does it anyway: he dials Brendan's number.

His throat constricts when he hears his son's voice on the other end say, "Hello?" He feels ashamed of the last few times they've spoken face to face, hoping Brendan won't hang up on him.

"Hi, Brendan. How are you?"

There's a moment in which he's almost glad he can't see Brendan's face before he says, "Pop? What is it?"

"Well, I figured, your birthday's coming up and I wanted to send you a gift, maybe a fun book—I remember you really liked reading. I was wondering if you'd maybe heard of David Sedaris?"

"I've heard of him. Haven't read him." He sounds as uncomfortable as Paddy feels. "Listen, Pop, I appreciate that you're trying to meet me halfway but…but I can't let you back in quite yet. Back in the house, anyway."

He tries to lighten it up. "That's why I offered to mail it to you. I remember the post office was still open as a line of communication."

"What I mean is…"

"No, I know." Paddy adjusts his grip on the phone. "And I understand. I shouldn't have pretended that I was the victim here."

There's some relief in Brendan's voice when he responds, a little looser, a little more openly annoyed. "You really shouldn't have. I mean, do you even remember what you were like all those years?"

"I was blacked out for a lot of it," Paddy says. There's a sigh on the other end of the phone. "You and Tommy are the ones who have a clear memory of everything, and how you both have held it is a pretty good idea of how badly I fucked up as a parent.

"And, um, speaking of Tommy," he starts, closes his eyes and for a moment waits for the click signaling that Brendan's just hung up on him. It doesn't come. "At risk of sounding like a meddling old man, I think the two of you should talk."

Again, he waits for the click. It doesn't come, but Brendan's voice is strained as he says, "What gives you the right to say that?"

"Absolutely nothing," Paddy admits.

"And what makes you think that Tommy wants to speak to me?"

Point taken. The man could be absolutely venomous. He could attest. "With the fight…yes, you injured him but he's started building himself back up like he never could have done if you hadn't. He's not as angry. He ain't no ray of sunshine, but he's not as angry. Nor for the past month or so, anyway, now that he has more freedom of movement."

After a hesitation on the other end, Brendan says, "David Sedaris sounds nice, Pop. Thanks."

E

"Tommy? It's me, Brendan." He expects the silence on the other end. They haven't spoken in over three months, and before the fight hadn't spoken in over a decade. He's starting to think Pop's advice was a load of bullshit; a manipulative old man's hopes to get his two sons to talk again.

"Hi," comes his brother's voice over the phone, brusque and rough. Not this again. "Your birthday's on Sunday."

"Yeah. That was why I wanted to talk to you, actually. Thing is, I'm having a small party then, just family and a couple of close family-friends." He leans against his desk, holds onto the edge of it for support, because these are not words that come easily and he'll be damned if Tommy dismisses it like he's dismissed his previous offers to repair their relationship. "I never stopped seeing you as family, even if you did. I always hoped that I'd get to spend a birthday with my little brother again."

There's a lingering silence on the other end. It doesn't come as a surprise. "Is that who I am?"

"Yeah. That's who you are. And I'm hoping you'd be willing to come over and talk as family, not as competitors."

"It don't look like we'll ever be competing again. Not in the cage, anyway." The tone is a little less suspicious, a little less hostile.

"I've retired for good," Brendan tells him.

"Yeah, I heard. Brendan…"

He waits, but nothing comes. It's as though Tommy wants to communicate something that can't be spoken. He helps him out. "You're not obligated to come, Tommy."

And then his brother says something spoken almost in a rush, something that takes him by surprise. "Can I bring someone?"

"Who do you have in mind? I can't let Pop back into the house. Not yet, anyway. There was something that happened before he sobered up. Well, not really just one thing."

"It's not Pop. It's a…friend."

The way Tommy hesitates, phrases it, is something Brendan has never heard from his brother, who is by now a grown man who at the moment comes across almost as adolescent. It's a bridge they never crossed. He's certain Tommy never got some of the social luxuries that are so easy to take for granted. He's felt guilt over it before.

"I'm glad you stayed. Everything worked out for you, 'kay? You leave, you get the opposite. You leave, you get to bury people."

He can't help the teasing smile snaking its way into his voice. "A girlfriend?"

"…Kind of," his brother says, once again in a manner Brendan has never heard from him. "I kinda fucked things up with her. I don't know if she'd be up for it."

"If she is," he says, starting to allow himself to breathe—Tommy did imply, by asking to bring someone, that he'd be coming—"Would three be good for the two of you?"

"I'll ask." And after a pause, Tommy adds, "Is there anything you'd want me to bring or get you?"

And he says something he means with every part of his soul. "Just coming will be the best gift you could give me."

Before ending the conversation, Tommy says one last thing. "Brendan." There's a slight urgency in his voice.

"Yeah?"

"This girl; she don't drink."

He blinks. Considering it was a small family affair he hadn't really thought of setting out alcohol. "Okay."

After the end of the call, he realizes that all those months ago when Pop drove the length of Pennsylvania to tell him about his sobriety and Tommy, he wasn't gloating. He was trying, however tactlessly, to pick up the pieces of his broken family and get the three Conlons—or rather, the two Conlons and the Riordan, now—together again. Trying to set out the bait—"Tommy's back"—in the hopes of coaxing Brendan back, in the hopes that things between the three of them could be salvaged. Now the old man's certain he won't be a part of that family, but has hope for his two sons to repair their own relationship all the same.

A

Nearly a week goes by without a call. She's pretty sure that means the end. That Tommy can't handle being with someone who has as much extra baggage as he does. It's a shame. If he's looking for either someone with no faults or skeletons in her closet he'll be alone, which would be unfortunate because in spite of the rage and the long-standing grudges, he is at his core a good man.

Saturday after a morning meeting she turns her cell phone back on to see she missed a call from a number she's had memorized since she first learned it. She debates whether or not to bother returning the call throughout her walk home, and finally figures, why the hell not? She can listen to whatever he has to say, take it or leave it. She doesn't have to agree with him or accept anything from him.

When she calls back he gets it on the first ring.

"Jane?"

"That's my name," she says as she gets back into her apartment and locks the door one-handed.

"I need your help with something," he says.

She's sorely tempted to hang up on him. "I doubt that," she says.

"My brother invited me to come to his birthday."

"And?"

"And I don't know how the fuck I'll be able to get through it. I need a friend there."

Her temper flares. No; it erupts. "Really? Is that what I am? A friend?" She doesn't wait for him to respond. She can't, really; she's boiling over and there's nothing she can do about it. "Because yelling at me in public, treating me like some untouchable low-life, testing me with alcohol and girls who'd fuck you if given half the chance, and taking me out just so you can make me feel like shit is not how you treat a friend." She's pretty sure the volume her voice has reached can be classified as "shouting." Her breath is harsh, her hands are shaking and she feels the threat of tears, tears of anger or tears of frustration, she's not sure. She keeps telling herself she won't cry over him. She turns the phone away from her face so he won't hear her choking back the sobs that wrack her throat. She wraps her free arm around her stomach, because it lurches, feels as though she's about to throw up. "A real friend would still treat me like a human being after finding out that I have skeletons in my closet just like everyone else on the fucking planet. Don't you fucking dare ask me to help you."

And before she hangs up, she hears, "His name's Brendan."

She blinks; she can scarcely breathe, but something in her mind, when she's way too far-gone to think straight, clicks. "What?"

"My brother's name is Brendan." He says it as though it's being tortured out of him.

She'd like to think that she's heard wrong, but it goes with what she's seen, what she's heard from Tommy. When he said they were related, he never mentioned exactly how. She should've pieced it together when he told her about growing up with Paddy Conlon beating the shit out of "me, my mother and my brother" and how "Brendan Conlon and I learned to take a punch" from him, but she'd been in such a rage that she's surprised she can remember what he said. She's completely at a loss. She can't and won't forgive him right now but neither can she bring herself to hang up quite yet.

"Conlon?" she whispers.

"Yeah."

She finds she has to cross to the couch, sinks onto it. "The man you fought, the man who dislocated your shoulder, is your brother." She lets out a shaking breath, doesn't know quite what else to say. It makes much more sense as to why Tommy would be afraid to go there alone, assuming that Patrick won't be joining, which she is certain is the case.

"I fucked up." She tunes back in when she hears Tommy's voice again. He sounds imploring, sounds almost impatient. She can almost hear him say 'I don't talk much so when I do it's something important that you need to understand.' "I know I fucked up. I thought you were going to fuck me up somehow, and it made me feel like I had to get to you first. I don't know why, I just did." These are words that won't make up for everything Tommy has said and done to her in the past few weeks, but there's something gratifying about hearing them now. "I just needed to know."

"That I wasn't a carbon copy of the image you have based on one other person of everyone who's ever been in the twelve steps?" Her voice sounds higher than usual; sounds brittle, breaking.

"Kind of, yeah," he says, on the defensive. "I saw the pathetic, needy guy he became. I fuckin' saw him hit the goddamn bottle again."

"Did you want him to relapse?"

"No. I wanted him to leave me the hell alone. I wanted him to understand that he'd had the chance to be my father years ago and he threw it away and he's not getting it back."

"And I stand by my earlier claim: I'm not your goddamn father."

"I know." His breath on the other end is harsh.

And, like a fool, not understanding why, because her decisions are never conscious with him, hold neither reason nor rhyme, she sighs and leans into the couch. "When is it?"

"Tomorrow at three."

"All right."

"In Philadelphia."

She should say no now. That would be the smart, normal thing to do. "That's gotta be a five-hour drive," she tells him, as if he doesn't know already.

"…Yeah," he says on the other end, a hint of apology in his voice.

She sits back and thinks.

He must be terrified to do this, to go down and face his brother again. There's so much she doesn't know about their relationship prior to SPARTA, but from the clues she has, it's not pretty. She guesses there's no small amount of rage still rattling inside that sometimes dark mind of his.

Maybe it's because she's stupid.

Maybe it's because she's crazy.

Maybe it's because she's weak.

"Just tell me he's not a partier or some swinging bachelor or a real-life Quagmire or something," she says. She's done with the tests. Finished. She doesn't care if he still has some lined up.

"He's a family man. He got two young kids who're probably gonna be there." There's something damn snide, downright contentious in the way he says 'family man.' She figures she should make a note of it and put it alongside her countless other unresolved observations about him. After a beat, "Who's Quagmire?"

She can't help but smile to himself. "Cartoon character. But that's not the point." She hesitates, doesn't want to bend to his will but he's right; he can't do this alone. Not yet, anyway. And there's something oddly, sickly satisfying about hearing him admit that he needs help, and, what's more, needs her help. "Yeah. Fine. I'll do it."

"I'll pick you up at ten," he says.

"All right."

Before she can click 'end', Tommy says, "Jane?"

"Hmm?"

There's a beat. She could almost swear she hears a hint of a smile in his voice. "Thank you."