đ¸ đ for sweet boy Vince
CW: PTSD, referenced alcoholism and withdrawal, referenced death
Takes place after the end of the Same Bed Arc
"You can't cry in there." The voice is raspy and muffled through the door. The pounding of a fist against it, though, is louder. Vince leans over, elbows on his knees and his hands pressed against his face. His palms are sweaty, it trickles down the back of his neck to soak into his t-shirt, joining the damp spots already growing. Designer shirts soak up sweat and tears just like the cheap ones, in the end.
He doesn't answer the voice.
Maybe if he doesn't answer, it'll just go away, and leave him here to be miserable and self-pitying and all the things the podcasts his old therapist used to tell him to listen to tell him not to be. Visualize self-confidence growing within you, like you've planted a seed of understanding...
He might be laughing, now. It's sort of hard to tell, because tears are still dampening his cheeks underneath his palms. His shoulders are shaking, just like his hands.
"I don't understand anything," He mutters, and wonders how many people would hate him if they knew the truth, that Vincent Shield is hiding in a house in a poor neighborhood, that he loathes his fortune and fame, that it was never worth the price he agreed to pay.
It had never been worth the deal he and Carlotta Grant had agreed to, it had never been worth all the nights he sat up drinking until he drowned out the voice of Owen against his ear. It wasn't worth Kauri's desperate dying struggle to survive on top of him. It wasn't ever worth it.
A moment later, the pounding starts up again. "Hey! I said you can't cry in there!"
Vince groans, sitting back up and rolling his head back to stare up at the ceiling as he drops his hands, silently entreating the flat off-white tile marked with evidence of a half-dozen repairs made over the decades to somehow intervene with him on this.
"Why the hell can't I?" He asks, willing his voice to stay calm and even. It only wobbles a little. He's sort of proud of that.
Once an actor, always an actor. Good job, Shield, too bad you're pretty sure you'll never act again.
"Because the other bathroom's broken, remember? Go cry somewhere else, literally anywhere fucking else, dumbass!"
Vince pushes to his feet, reluctantly, and goes to the door, pulling the little hook up to unlock it. It swings open inside on creaky old hinges, and he's face to face with Nat's only current resident runaway. "Fine. I'll go. Hope you're happy."
"I wasn't made for happiness." Jameson's eyes narrow, searching his face. "You look like shit, Shield."
"Thanks," Vince says heavily, moving past him into the hallway. "You look like someone got real drunk and took a lawn mower to your head and the grass just started growing back in."
He waits for the vitriol Jameson will spit, but there's only silence. Vince makes it a few steps before guilt makes him turn back, mouth open to apologize.
But Jameson doesn't look angry. Instead, he's looking at him over his shoulder. And he's smiling, crooked and pulled up more on one side than the other, emphasizing a deep scar from some long-ago blade. "Hey, so you do have a spine. Nicely done."
"Uh... thanks. Look, I'm sorry, I'm just having some trouble-"
"We're all having trouble. I've said worse things to better people. Just... you know what, come on." Vince, despite being about ten years older, is pulled along like a child when Jameson grabs him by the wrist, down the upstairs hallway to a room at the end of the hall. When the door opens, Vince is hit with the smell of old paper, books and dust and time. The room's a disaster area - just piles of storage. A giant old wooden desk with boxes and boxes on top of it. There's boxes stacked everywhere, some half-open, some closed. Yellowing papers half-fall from old photo albums.
"You can cry in here," Jameson says, letting his arm drop and gesturing inside. "I do. Or my closet, but this is a good spot, because you're alone and people mostly don't look. You can get under the desk, or, like, look real sad out the window... I get it. This is where I go when I want to think about him but I don't want to talk about him, you know?"
Vince's throat tightens, and he has to swallow past the growing constriction. His bruises are fading, now, but the memory of Owen's hands around his throat never seems to leave. He looks over at a framed photo on the wall, black-and-white, of two people that look immensely unhappy squinting out at whoever held the camera. "Him?"
"Yeah. Mine was a 'him'. Yours is that Owen motherfucker. There's always somebody to cry about, right? And... I don't know. You, uh. You seem like maybe you loved yours, a little bit, too."
"No, I-... I didn't want him like th-that-... I told him no-"
"I didn't say that you wanted to fuck him, Shield. I just said maybe you loved him a little, before all the trying to murder you shit." Jameson shrugs. "Fuck off if you don't like it, it was just a thought. Just trying to help, fuck me for trying."
This time, when he turns to go, Vince is the one who grabs his arm with one hand. Jameson turns to look back at him, and Vince searches his face, trying to understand what he sees there. Derision, dismissal, but something like compassion, too.
"Wait," Vince says, and his voice is hoarse. He can feel tears all over again, and he fights hard to push them down. How was it always so easy to cry on command in the movies, but he can't control shit now that he's here and it's over? "Wait, just. I'm sorry. You're right. He was my-... my best friend, when we were kids. He was my... my only real friend, ever, before Nat."
"That creep was your only friend? That's really fucking sad," Jameson says, and they both laugh - Vince the airy breathy laughter of someone about to fall apart, and Jameson the barely-there sound of someone trying not to mock, just gently rib towards good humor.
"It is, oh my God, it is so fucking sad," Vince groans, and finds himself sliding to the ground, ignoring the spike of pain right up his spine. He isn't fully healed yet. It aches, in so many places. It aches deep inside of him worse. "We did everything together, for years. We were everything for-... for each other. For years. And I-... I had to-"
"I know." Jameson, with a grunt of pain of his own, slowly makes his way down to seated as well. He has to balance himself carefully, and Vince notices how his legs don't quite bend all the way, how he kicks them out to one side.
"Yeah, I just-... I thought I'd gotten away, and then he sent flowers and showed up at my house and then there was-... I thought he'd killed Kauri. I think he had his corpse on top of me, that it was over, it... It was like watching him murder me, from outside myself, like... like watching myself die under his hands, because I c-couldn't save me, and just... I had to-... I had to-"
"You did." Jameson nods, and when he reaches out Vince grabs onto his hands and holds tight. "You had to do it, Shield, I get it. I did it, too, twice. I'd do it again. But... but I get how it doesn't... leave your head, after, does it?"
"No," Vince says, and his voice breaks. His head drops as the sob escapes his attempts to hold it back, and he leans forward, with Jameson pulling him gently, until his forehead rests on the other man's shoulder, until his hands are gripped into the fabric of an old thrift-store t-shirt. Until the tears break through again and he doesn't quite drown, because someone else is holding him up. "I see it-... every night I see how he looked when I-... but I h-had to-"
"You had to," Jameson repeats, softly. He slides his arms slowly around Vince. "You had to, and Kauri's alive because you did. You saved a life."
"You saved Kauri's when you did. And yours. Sometimes the motherfuckers have to die so that you don't, that's how it works for us. And you never wore a collar, but you're one of us, or good as anyway."
"But he didn't get to murder you."
Vince clings to that small, slim thread of comfort, the single shining bright spot in the well of darkness within him. And Jameson holds on until Vince is ready - and able - to let go.
"Jesus, I want a drink so much," Vince says, and hates himself for the childlike whine in his voice, hates the way his mouth is dry and his hands keep shaking. "I just want a drink-"
"Sorry, no booze allowed," Jameson says, but there's no vitriol in his voice any longer. "But can I interest you in a can of Spam she has in the kitchen cabinets for some godawful reason? That's kind of like alcohol, in that it's probably really bad for your liver."
They both laugh again, and Vince shakes his head, hair brushing the side of Jameson's neck. "N-no thanks. But... thanks, Jameson."
"Yeah, whatever. Come in here if you want to cry, it's a good spot for it. But don't use the fucking bathroom for it anymore, at least 'til she gets the downstairs fixed."
"Right. God, I was living in a mansion before this-"
"Yeah, it was fuck-ugly and looked like if a refrigerator married the internet and had an awful baby. This house is better. Now, I need to go to the bathroom for real."
With another grunt of pain, Jameson pulls away to get to his feet, and Vince watches him leave, how he limps a little when he wasn't limping just a few minutes ago. How it must have cost him to get down on the floor and back up again.
He looks around at the room full of the passage of time, and exhales as he takes in the dust and the age of everything around him.
"Yeah," He breathes, and finds himself calming. "This house is better."
