dog_eat_dog | IC Inbox

[She wants to deny it with every fiber of her being but she’s here to fucking wreck his shit. She knows it.]

Yeah. Doesn’t matter though. He’s dead. Dead to me, too.

Would you've felt different if he'd come back here? You was still gonna be dead, Tess.

[She drops the sledgehammer aside deliberately just to round on him:]

I was supposed to be dead and never find out about any of this shit!

[He remains calm in the face of that anger, knowing he deserves it, knowing she likely needs it. He can function as a lightning rod.]

I ran like that for years, Tess. I ran like that even more before I came here. You think you can do anythin', because you're just gonna die soon.

[He shakes his head, a light grimace on his face.]

But you know you can't live like that, now. You can have your anger, but you gotta change that as much as I do.

[She moves towards him like she might push him, but there's no sense in that when he's up against the counter already, so she just crowds him, fuming.]

How the fuck am I supposed to change, huh? I died for a kid I don't know and a man who moved on from me like I was nothing, and then they went on to be a happy little family until he got his skull caved in by some other survivor.

Every single person in my world is competition. I don't get to live any other way.

[He doesn't move a muscle when she crowds him. He accepts that he's said something hard, maybe even a little cruel. She can get into his face about it. As long as she gets that damn anger out somehow.]

That ain't what I meant. I'm talking reckless, Tess. You're letting grief and anger do the talkin', and you can let 'em. Just don't keep 'em.

[Tess doesn't shout, exactly, but her voice lifts, heated, right in his face:]

What the fuck do you want me to do? Scream? Cry? I'm sick of it. All I've ever gotten to keep is anger and grief, so I'm going to burn the last ten years. Fuck Joel. He didn't waste a minute on me, and I've wasted enough on him.

You want to scream, you scream. You wanna cry, you should damn well cry-

But I don't think you're bein' honest about why you want to break his guitar.

Honest?

[ Arthur’s been nothing but honest with her, but she’s not even sure where to start. How to explain everything, even if she wanted to?

All she wants to do is throw him under the bus, forget her feelings.]

You know he had a little girl, once? A daughter. Whole time I’ve known him, he’s rarely said a word about her. And his whole life is like that, doesn’t talk about anyone who’s dead or gone, and I knew he’d do it to me too. I knew he would. No matter what, he’d still leave me with a fucking apartment and a guitar, and he’d go on and make a life elsewhere like I never existed.

And Ellie says... [ Fuck, she’s trying not to choke up with anger. ] She says she’s his kid now! He settles down and plays daddy with the kid I had to beg him to take the minute I’m gone? He couldn’t even do the one thing that I asked him to do! Fuck him!

[He'd tell her he understands Joel's behavior. He had a little boy, once, and he never talks about him, or the kid's mother. It hurts too much to talk about, and so he doesn't, and the longer he went the fewer people knew about them, and the easier it got to just move on with his life. To forget that deep scar on his soul.

But she keeps going, and he swallows his words. Sometimes people remain in the past; but the people left behind don't have to enjoy it. He can respect that. He can understand that. He's been left often enough. He's keeping it up for her, even though he desperately wants to just pull her in for an embrace or taunt her so she can punch him and get it out that way.]

You know what- you're damn right. Fuck him. Fuck that guy for not following through on what you was tryin' to do. And fuck him for not talking to Ellie about you. You deserved a hell of a lot better than that.

Right? Jesus fucking Christ, I asked him for one fucking thing after ten years together and he couldn’t follow through.

[In the heat of the moment it’s easy to hate him. Easier to throw things.

She paces away, storming around like a zoo animal.]

I was right to keep him at arm’s length. Obviously that’s how it always was for him. Just... just business.

[Arthur crosses his arms again, and broods on the wisdom of telling her, again. Maybe now isn't the time. But still...]

Maybe so. Maybe that's how it was for him.

I don’t know if that’s worse. [Bitter.] Otherwise it’s me, he chose to keep that shit from me. Having to piece together his life from his brother, from little bits when he was drunk or hurt. Shit he’d say in his sleep.

[She breathes a long, aggravated sigh, running both hands through her hair.]

But he was with me for ten years, what kind of sociopath does that?

[Fuck. He shakes his head and runs a hand through his beard, unconsciously mirroring her with her hands in her hair.]

Some things... some things are so difficult to talk about that you can't. Especially with people that matter to you.

I don't know the fella. I might well be wrong. But I... [He takes a deep breath, and for this he can't meet her eyes. He told Rains Fall, but he thought he was dying, then. And the old man had something about him that just made Arthur talk. But he can't remember who he'd talked to about this with after he'd gotten back to Dutch and Hosea that first time.]

Well, I had a kid, too. Once. And I had... I had a lot of pain and fear that I never talked to no one about, besides that. And it weren't a good thing, that I didn't. But I could understand part of it.

[Tess doesn’t reply for a moment, still pacing, but she stops at the counter and leans her elbows on it and slouches there for a moment. Of course. Of course Arthur knows something of that too, because he knows something of everything.]

It fucked him up, it fucked me up, it’ll fuck Ellie up, too. Maybe already has.

[She saw it on her face.

She takes a deep breath.]

What happened to your kid?

[Prove it’s so hard.]

[He'll prove both things: that it's hard, and that it's hard to talk about it with people you care about. He cares about Tess, and it's damn hard to talk about this with her.

He clenches his jaw and hunches his shoulders, but he obliges her.]

Some lowlife robbed the house his mom and him lived in. Killed 'em both. All for a lousy ten dollars.

Didn't find until they was already buried.

[This is so goddamn hard, but he's willing himself to keep going. To show her.]

[She watches him, still quietly fuming, but hurting too, for herself and Arthur and maybe even Joel a little too. It’s a world away from anything she could relate to, but maybe that’s on her and Joel too: spending ten years with a man who couldn’t love her enough to make her a wife, a mother. Things she might have wanted if it felt like there was any hope for the world.

Arthur gives her more honesty in one conversation than Joel manages in a year, and that cuts deep.]

His kid died in his arms after getting shot on Outbreak Day. But ten dollars? I don’t know how you have faith in anyone after that.

Jesus. [He mutters it, shaking his head. Hard as his situation was, by now he just lets it underline how hard other people's situations can be. But he knows it wasn't always like that.]

I didn't. Just Dutch and Hosea and John, and even those-- I hated 'em. For not having had to deal with that loss. And John, he went away for a year after Jack was born. Hated him for that. Abandoning what he had.

That’s some nasty shit to go through.

[ And she means that genuinely, but her gaze doesn’t quite meet his eyes, and then she looks away entirely. She wishes, bitterly, that she felt any less cold than she can accuse Joel of being.]

I know everyone’s fucked up, me included, but I just know I’m gonna be pissed if he could get it together for some kid but not for me.

[And deep down, she already knows it’s true.]

...Yeah. Yeah, Tess, you're damn right to be angry about that.

[He kind of needs something, himself- but he'd wanted to embrace her from that first moment. He turns so he's facing her where she's leaning on the counter, and puts his hand on hers.]

You spent a lot of time with that man. You ought to've...

[She glances at that hand and then at him, but she doesn’t pull away.]

Ought to have what, pushed him harder?

[He shakes his head.]

Gotten from him what you wanted from him. Be it intimacy, or just the honesty of a good friend. Maybe it was your world, or it was his own damn head keepin' that from you, but you shoulda had it.

[More than that she thinks, and it twists her heart just to think it. ]

The world, his head, me, all of it. He was my partner, he had his ways, I know it could have happened if things were different.

[But they weren’t. Never will be.

She wipes at her eyes with her free hand, still feeling aggravated, not wanting to be sad for even a second.]

It’s never going to be different. Ellie’s here to get him back, and even if she does that, he had a whole new life there. I don’t factor in.

[His thumb rubs small circles into her skin, quietly. He doesn't acknowledge her almost-tears, but he doesn't ignore them either.]

What d'you think he'd say, if he was here with you right now?

[That gets a bitter little laugh.]

He'd tell me I'm smarter than all this. The conversation would be over long before now. Maybe he'd kick me out.

[Which sucks to admit, but it's true.]

And then tomorrow I'd drop by again and we'd pick back up and pretend it never happened at all.

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