Chapter Text
It makes sense that Fezco should be the one to knock the shit out of him so hard it makes him wish he was never born. Nate's never believed in God, but sometimes he's convinced there's a higher power making sure he gets all that's coming to him. Whether it's Maddy's dramatic reprisals—or the repeated disfiguring blows to the face that Fezco is delivering to him now.
All in all, there's a lot worse Nate thinks he deserves, and although no one knows it, at one point he resigns himself and welcomes the fists openly. Punch after punch. This all in spite of feeling like he might choke on the blood pooling in his mouth. He's forced to drink it, once, twice. And Fezco doesn't stop, instead knocks him so hard he can feel his lip splitting for a third time.
Fists and iron—maybe this is what justice tastes like.
People are yelling amidst all this, and there's little Nate can do but lie there and take it. He used to play like this with his brother—(ages ago when they still got along)—and Aaron would get him in a chokehold and slap his face as hard as he could without leaving a mark. "You bruise too easily," he would complain. And when Nate asked when it was his turn to hit back, Aaron would run away and tell him it was his turn whenever he caught him. (He never did.)
But unlike the temporary stinging of Aaron's slaps, the sensation after each of Fezco's hits only gets exponentially worse, and Nate's eyes and cheeks are throbbing in a pain so remarkable that he wonders if he's ever felt anything like it. Up to this point, no one has been brave enough to catch him off guard like this. To attack him and leave absolutely no room for defense or recovery.
No one's been able to pull Fezco away long enough for Nate to spit out the blood and take a small breath of air. His nose is the first thing that Fezco busted, and Nate supposes it serves him right for fucking with people's lives in the name of so-called filial duty (his father really isn't worth all this trouble; Nate knows this better than anyone). But towards the end of the beating he isn't thinking much of anything anymore. His brain has turned to mush and he's half convinced he's either going to pass out or die.
At least Fezco's eyes will be the last thing he sees.
He loses consciousness, comes to, sees a blur of a face he thinks he should probably recognize. But he's also soothed because he can hear a soft voice.
Cassie, of all people.
And she's trying to take care of him—or at least that's what it feels like. Her presence is calming, like a warm blanket at night, and she's saying something to him that his brain can only process as melodic sounds.
There's others here too but it's her voice and its worried careful lilt that draws him out from the dark.
Fezco is a good friend, and Nate acknowledges that much even now. Wearing a hospital gown, as he is, and staring at the perfect off-white tiles above him.
Maybe, in a parallel universe, he'd be fighting alongside Fezco instead of with him. That's a funny thought. It makes him want to laugh, but he isn't sure if his face will let him.
Even though his dad asks, Nate doesn't tell Cal that it was Fezco. Some guy at the party, I don't know. And he doesn't even have to convince Maddy not to say anything because she's never been a snitch, and she's never liked talking to his family anyway.
He wonders what would happen if his dad knew the truth. Would he go and avenge him or something? Would he even remember that he knew Fezco from before , when he was just a kid like Nate? That there was a time not all that long ago when he was Nate's best friend?
Probably not. Cal never remembered. In fact, he'd call Fezco a loser and he'd warn Nate not to end up like him. "Drugs will rot your brain," he'd say, "Just like they did to that Fez kid."
And Nate wouldn't correct him about any of it—or tell him about Fezco's accident, about his little brother, about the absence of responsible adults in his life. He just shut his mouth tight and wondered how it came to be that they were now strangers.
And the more he had heard this kind of talk from his father, the more he eventually started to believe it. That Fezco had nothing going for him. That he was an aimless dirtbag pedalling shit to crazy high school junkies.
Maybe it just made more sense to hate him than to dwell on the past. Maybe it made more sense to become like his father than to face the truth like a normal person.
It was ironic, too, because his mom would tell him that his father had been no better than Fezco during his high school days. That their friend group was all about smoking and drinking and doing all kinds of "shenanigans".
The truth was that he was still thinking about Fezco even when he wasn't.
And now he's here in the hospital, once again rethinking everything he once thought was true.
Nate is eleven years old and he's at a birthday party.
They're playing truth or dare, away from all the adults, and it's Nate's turn to decide. He's never been a chicken.
"Dare," he says, and the other kids look around at each other with excitement in their eyes.
"I dare you," says one of the kids, "to lick the floor for 5 seconds."
"Okay," Nate says, and gets down to do it. It's salty and hot under the summer sun, but it's easy enough. At least he's not eating nasty food mixtures or any of the other stuff rotting under the sun by the picnic table.
The others make disgusted but satisfied faces at Nate's performance, and Fezco gives him an encouraging high five when he gets back up. It feels nice to get praise from Fezco even though it's for something stupid like this. There's something about him, even to Nate, that seems almost wise. He's quiet but confident, smart but not a show off. Fezco's just cooler than everyone else, and he does it without even trying.
He has pretty eyes, also, with long eyelashes like a girl, and Nate wrestles with this thought a lot but he doesn't tell anyone about it. His mother had mentioned it to him at one point too. "Oh my god," she had said. "That friend of yours has such pretty eyes!" He had just nodded and looked away. Had his mother noticed him staring?
"I dare you..." the birthday girl trails off, breaking Nate from his thoughts. Her face lights up with an idea. "I dare you to kiss Nate."
Nate looks around and everyone is laughing. He doesn't know whose turn it is anymore, but he hopes it's not Suzy Pinkman because, oh god, he hates her annoying squeaky voice and her frustrating goody-two-shoes attitude.
She's also laughing, though, her big teeth on full display, and so he knows it's not her. The only person who isn't laughing is Fezco, and his mouth is turned into a small pensive frown.
"But we're friends," Fezco says.
Nate can't even bring himself to say anything at all. He's just studying Fezco's facial expression and wondering why he didn't mention that they were both boys first. Or straight. Or whatever.
"Yeah, come on," one of the kids says to the birthday girl. "Don't make them do this gay shit."
"Why? Are you scared you'll like it?" the girl giggles tauntingly. "It's my birthday ! Just do it! I already had to kiss Mira—and no offense Mira—but she ate some of that nasty thing my aunt made."
The girl sits down and crosses her legs. "This is Truth or Dare and that's the dare."
No one says anything and the group simply waits for Nate or Fezco to make the next move. Nate is still frozen. For some reason, he's thinking this revenge doesn't really feel like a punishment. Aside from the embarrassment of it all.
Fezco's freckles are scrunched up in thought.
But suddenly, out of nowhere, Nate decides he'll go for it, if Fezco will have him. Damn it all to hell.
He'll have his first kiss here in front of everyone, at this lame birthday party with terrible food, and with his best friend who probably doesn't feel the same way. (What is the same way?) If he doesn't pull away from him at least. Because after all, it's just a dare.
It's just a dare.
And he forgets it's Fezco's dare too, instead of his own, and walks over to him with his heart banging in his chest and his breath caught somewhere in his throat. His eyes are as pretty as ever, sky blue and delicate like the flowers his dad likes to buy for his mom, glittering between a smattering of freckles.
But before he can do anything, one of the girl's parents arrives.
"Let's all come back in for pictures!" she yells out, and Nate stops before anything happens. "Come on, let's hurry up! Fezco's grandma is here to pick him up and Julie P. also has to go!"
Fezco glances at Nate as they walk over to the house but they don't talk about the situation. They just get in frame for pictures, and plaster on fake smiles while Nate feels a heavy sense of shame growing on his shoulders.
"Fezco!" someone calls from outside. Presumably his grandmother.
"Heading home," Fezco says, grabbing his stuff. "See you at school." As usual, Nate can't read him. He waves goodbye dismissively and plops down at the kitchen table, where he's presented with another slice of cake from the overeager aunt who probably baked it.
"Yaay, seconds!" she cheers, and moves along the kitchen to attend to the other partygoers.
He accepts the slice even though his dad has been hounding him about eating healthy lately.
The cake is large and chunky, its exterior covered in glitter rainbow confetti flakes and thick, greasy frosting. It might look good if he didn't already feel terrible. He scoops the frosting onto his finger and then wipes it back off onto the paper plate. The white bread inside is bland-looking, but it seems more appetizing to his stomach. His father's words are also echoing in his head so he picks at the dry bread with his fingers and leaves that in his mouth instead. Completely tasteless. But at least he's starting to calm down.
A part of the cake completely crumbles to the side, and he wonders if it's even baked all the way through. He wonders if Fezco could make a better one, because for some godforsaken reason that kid is good at everything, including cooking actual dishes and baking pastries and doing things Nate wouldn't expect a kid their age, let alone a boy, would know how to do. (Even though Fezco insists it's only because he has cake mix and "the instructions are right there.")
Nate doesn't know it's the last time he'll be seeing Fezco for months. That he won't hear a single word from him, and since he doesn't really know where he lives, he'll spend some nights thinking that Fezco somehow died or ran away because of that stupid dare.
Nate wants to crumble into nothing like the soppy wet mess on the plate before him.
When his mom picks him up, she's worried about how quiet he is. She reaches a hand out to his forehead while she's driving and he looks at her with a desire to blurt everything out.
"Well, I don't think you have the flu."
"It's just the food," Nate says, keeping it all in. "I'll be fine."
He explains he's feeling nauseous, which is actually true, and she agrees to let him rest for a bit while she goes to buy him something from the pharmacy. He gets into the house, and he realizes Aaron and his dad are also gone. He has the house all to himself for as many minutes as his mom is away.
Usually he'd slink away to his room or venture outside with a desire for aimless adventuring, but he figures if he's alone with himself for too long, he'll start thinking about Fezco again and how he probably completely ruined their friendship. He kicks at the wall a little, and then heads to his father's study.
Maybe he can watch a movie. Find something to take him out of his head.
He goes to a drawer and starts shuffling through the DVDs. Need for Speed, Indiana Jones, The Lion King, Remember the Titans. It all seems boring. He reaches the last movie in the row—some lame, raunchy college movie, but then he discovers the drawer has a false bottom beneath it.
He tucks his finger along the edge and pulls it outward, making sure to fish out the DVDs falling inside, and he's soon met with dozens of pristine plastic CD cases in the secret hiding space beneath. He pulls one out, and another, and then another. They're all different colors, and there's no writing on any of them. But he knows there must be something here because who would store empty CDs like this?
He grabs the first one he pulled out, curiosity burning in his mind, but he considers for a second that maybe he should simply leave it be. What if it's some gross sex thing between his parents? He runs his hand along the ridges of the case, but he figures that that's probably not it, and he excitedly groups the others into stacks, which he places back in the drawer.
He pushes the case open but the fold accidentally catches on his skin so hard that he thinks he might bleed. Pinches him like it's a venomous animal snapping its jaws shut tight. Was it a sign that the case was bright red?
He closes it again quickly, releases his hand from the plastic, and shakes his hand a few times, like the pain is droplets of water and not a pulsing part of his flesh. There's surprisingly no blood, just a patchy redness which quickly fades—but for days after watching the video inside, he swears he can feel a phantom pain lingering on the palm of his hand.
.
.
.
After the red one, he pulls a white case out, then a lime green, then all of the cases hidden in that small compartment, and he watches the beginning of all them, one by one in something between sick fascination and horror, trying to make sense of the things that he's seeing, trying to find one that isn't about all of this —whatever it is. He cuts them off as soon as they get bad, and oh, do they all go bad pretty quick. It's all violence and abuse and he's seeing and hearing things he's not sure how to process. He's trying to figure out if his mom knows about any of this, if his dad is gay, if any of this will eventually start to make sense.
And if the reason he's been feeling like this about Fezco is because he's exactly like his dad in all these weird fucking videos where no one seems to be aware that they're being filmed.
Nate hears the key turning in the lock and he hurriedly scrambles to put everything back in place before anyone can catch him. He dashes upstairs while the door is opening and stumbles into his room with a pounding head.
Everything feels wrong. He wants to take a shower, escape, bleach his mind clean and scrape off all the burnt parts if that was something he could do. Why the fuck did he have to watch all of the videos? Why the fuck didn't he just stop after the first?
He hears someone bounding up the staircase, heading towards his room, and his world has been so completely flipped on its head that he finds the nearest trashcan and starts vomiting uncontrollably.
He feels a cool hand on his forehead.
"Oh Nate, are you okay?"
It's his dad. He recoils instantly but shakes his head no. He's not okay. He's not okay at all.
Then his mom is suddenly upstairs with them, a bag from Walgreens in hand, which she drops once she sees Nate.
"Oh no, what happened? Are you alright? Here, let me get you cleaned up. Take off your shirt."
Nate doesn't move. He's just staring at his father's concerned face and feeling vomit dribbling down his chin.
"Do you want to shower instead? Can you make it to the shower?" his mom asks softly.
"I'll shower," Nate says. And he grabs a change of clothes and takes what is probably the longest shower of his life.
Fezco doesn't have a phone so Nate is unable to reach him. Days go by and he doesn't show up at school like he said he would either. And then it's weeks. And then it's months.
It's so long that Nate feels like he's going crazy.
The teachers don't seem to know anything either, just that Fezco will be "away" for a while but they don't even explain what " away " actually means.
Nate doesn't have anyone else to talk to, and all the things he saw in his dad's videos are making him feel like there's something sinister rotting in his soul. His mom is oblivious, and his dad only cares about football, and his brother is off in his own little world.
The only thing Nate can take refuge in is exercise, even if his dad's the one who's leading the trainings—because if he focuses hard enough on the movement of his legs or the weight of the ball while sprinting, he can forget that his dad is even there at all.
One day Nate decides to take his bike outside, and he thinks he sees him. Fezco with his little brother, carrying junk food home. He's using a cane to walk. Not even one of those contraptions that old people use to get around—but an actual cane, a shiny, dark red wooden thing with little black jewels on the bottom and some cursive script that Nate can't quite make out from this distance.
He gets closer. Stone Cold Pimp, it says, and Nate wants to run up to him and ask him if he's been playing so much GTA that it’s gone to his head and made him unable to go outside or something. A casual joke like he hasn't spent the last couple of months suffering without him.
But he doesn't. Just stays completely puzzled at the sight of someone he wasn't sure he would ever see again.
Fezco's little brother can't be more than four years old now, and he's munching on some chips as the two stroll along the uneven concrete.
Nate feels bad for a moment, that he hadn't looked hard enough to find him when he was just here in East Highland the entire time. But then suddenly he's very angry.
Furious, even.
Fezco had been here all along, doing seemingly well—and he'd abandoned Nate. Didn't even bother to come down and hear all the perfect excuses he had come up with to explain his behavior at the birthday party. If it had been a day, hell, even a few weeks, Nate could've fixed it. He could've walked it all back and better repressed all the dark and terrible shit that had been brewing in his mind for months now.
He chucks his bike to the side and then runs up to them, getting in between him and Ash.
"Hey, Fezco!" he shouts. He doesn't sound like himself.
He pushes Fezco to an empty mud patch to the side, and he falls flat on his ass. He's looking at him with those innocent eyes again, but before Nate can feel any remorse, Fezco pulls his cane back and thwacks him hard on the ankle while Ash starts kicking him and banging his little fists on his legs. Nate tries to push the kid away, throwing him to the floor, and then he hears Fezco speak for the first time since he last said goodbye.
"What the fuck , Nate?!" Fezco shouts. "Ash. Ash, stop. Ash… come here. "
His voice is also different. Slow. Like a drawl. And there's a huge scar along the side of his head. He brings himself up with great difficulty and forces his brother to get behind him.
"What happened to you?" Nate says. Ash is holding back tears but Nate doesn't really care right now. He's still angry. More than anything, he wants answers.
"Don't fuck with me...or my brother," Fezco warns him, bringing the cane up to Nate's chest. "Stand the fuck back."
He digs the cane further into his chest and pushes him away. This is all so bizarre.
"What the fuck happened to you?" Nate repeats.
"What the fuck…happened to you ?” he retorts slowly, wiping the tears off his brother’s cheeks. “Come on, Ash."
And the two keep on walking home.
Nate overhears the teachers mention that Fezco had light memory loss (just a few days worth) after his accident. That there are other cognitive and motor difficulties which will continue to affect him as he recovers—and maybe even beyond that—but for now it’s too early to tell.
The kids make fun of him when he's back at school. Sometimes Nate joins in when he’s especially angry. Calls him a retard and a bitch. He knows it gets back to Fezco, and he doesn’t try to stop it. He knows if Fezco really wanted to, he would fight back.
After a while Fezco is switched out to different classes, and there's rumors he'll have to repeat the year given all the time he's missed.
He's not the same anymore. Nothing is.
Over time, Fezco stops walking with that gaudy cane (the teachers had forced him to duct tape the inappropriate part), but everything else stays unfamiliar. He starts hanging around the older kids, and he most definitely doesn't want anything to do with Nate.
So Nate gets desperate. His taunting hasn’t worked once. He runs up beside him as he’s walking home one day.
"Look, I'm…sorry for pushing your stupid brother," he says. He’s gritting his teeth as he speaks and it's obvious that he's never learned how to apologize. "I was just pissed off because you disappeared."
Fezco gives him a look, like he’s swatting away an annoying fly, but keeps going.
Meanwhile Nate feels like he's silently grieving a death. Like he's a shadowy figure at Fezco's funeral and no one else can see anything inside the casket.
He wishes Fezco would be mad at him too, at least. Wishes he'd push him, hit him, scream in his face—anything at all but leave him behind.
It takes years, but his wish is eventually granted.