#061124

Scott chews on his lip. “Okay, um. If you don’t want me to open the door, say something. I’m just coming in to make sure you’re all right.”

After another moment’s pause with no response, he eases the door open, sidles in.

Jimmy’s not there.

It isn’t hard for him to tell—there’s barely anything in the room, all the clothes put away neatly and the bed made. The spot between the bed and the wall that Jimmy likes to wedge himself into is empty as well.

Okay, no need to panic yet. Jimmy’s fairly new to using the home gym, so maybe he’s just checking out the equipment.

A glance in the gym tells him all he needs to know.

Still, it doesn’t mean he’s—he hasn’t been kidnapped. He hasn’t been kidnapped. He’s safe.

Scott heads into the kitchen, checking around for evidence that Jimmy’s been there. And once he’s looking, it isn’t hard to find.

The lunchmeat is out on the counter. The dishes cabinet is open, but there’s nothing new in the sink or the dishwasher. Scott looks around, checks the fridge, the other cabinets, the trash—

There’s something in the trash.

There’s shards of china in the trash, some of them dark with something red and wet.

The pieces fall into place.

Jimmy had broken a plate, panicked, and ran. Scott knows it with a certainty that surprises him, so he checks the shoes by the door just to make sure and immediately notices that Jimmy’s are missing.

His phone is plugged in at his bedside. His shoes are gone. There’s blood on the china in the trash and Jimmy is missing.

Scott’s tearing out the front door practically before his mask is firmly on his face.

It’s luck, more than anything, that at the end of the street he picks the right direction and within minutes can pull up to the side of the road, where a familiar figure in a grey hoodie is curled up against a lamppost.

“Jimmy!” Scott calls out the open window, trading out his mask for a beanie without even checking to see if anyone’s watching. Traffic’s bad at this time of the day, and already there are people angry about having to go around his car, but he hops out anyway and jogs around to the sidewalk.

“Jimmy,” he says again, and he doesn’t grab him by the arms but almost does— “Jimmy, are you all right?”

Jimmy flinches away, his hands curled loosely in front of him—and they’re absolutely covered in blood—

“Get in the car, okay?” Scott says, glancing around. Nobody’s paying much attention to them, they’re still in the wealthy part of the city with less folks out on the streets, but he’s pulled over on a major road so he needs to get Jimmy out. “We can disinfect this and wrap your hands up, all right? You’re not in trouble, I promise. Can you get in the car?”

Jimmy nods after a moment, allowing Scott to lead him back to the car. Scott buckles him in and shuts the passenger door, taking only a moment to rub his face. It’s okay. He found Jimmy. Everything’s going to turn out fine.

He keeps telling himself that on the silent drive home.

“Sorry,” whispers Jimmy when Scott sits him down in the bathroom, snapping open the first aid kit.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, it’s all right,” Scott says absentmindedly, unscrewing the cap of the rubbing alcohol and dousing a cotton ball with it. Jimmy sniffs, eyeing him carefully, his face streaked with tears and his hands still held gingerly in front of him.

“I’m going to clean your hands, then wrap them in gauze. Is there anywhere else you’re hurt?”

Jimmy shakes his head. Slowly, he uncurls his fingers, splaying his hands out for Scott to see.

It’s not as bad as he’d feared when he’d first seen blood streaming down his knuckles. There’s one large gash in the center of Jimmy’s right palm, and a couple of smaller ones with little slivers of china stuck in them, but all the other cuts littering his fingers and palms are tiny and shallow.

Scott disinfects first, telling Jimmy everything before he does it. He’s going to be patting it with this cotton ball first, and it might sting a bit, but it’s going to help, okay? Now that that’s done, he’s going to press a little harder to wipe away the blood. Is everything still all right? Does he need to slow down?

Forcefully, Scott’s reminded of a night from so long ago, when a heavily bleeding and injured Solidarity had collapsed on his doorstep. He’d been less gentle in his administrations, then.

It keeps Scott up at night more often than he’d like to admit. If he’d let Jimmy stay longer, would he have learned more about Xornoth’s abuse? Would he have felt motivated to track down the villain and take them out before more damage could be done? Could he have saved Jimmy so much unnecessary pain, just by being a kinder person?

“I’m going to use tweezers now, okay? There’s some splinters I think I can get out.”

Jimmy nods, and as Scott watches, his face . . . settles, in some strange way. The tears brimming at his eyes vanish, his mouth sets into a determined line.

It’s unsettling, and Scott’s not quite sure what it means, but if it helps Jimmy brave the treatment, he’s fine with it.

Jimmy’s hands flinch back a couple of times as Scott digs into the cuts with the tweezers, plucking out slivers of porcelain until he has a small, bloodstained pile of them on the corner of the sink. Once the wounds look totally de-splintered, he wipes them down again with rubbing alcohol then wraps them in gauze.

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy says again when he’s almost done. Instead of his automatic response of earlier, Scott pauses to consider that.

“What are you apologizing for?” he asks eventually, because while he’s pretty sure he knows what it is—breaking the plate—he’s not sure Jimmy understands that it’s something forgivable.

But Jimmy, surprisingly, doesn’t mention the plate. “Lying,” he says, and his face doesn’t break. His eyes don’t water. But something changes in the quality of his voice, some terrified edge to it. “I lied to you. I’m sorry.”

“What did you lie about?”

“I—I told you I could control it,” says Jimmy. “Back at—at the hospital. That my powers—I could control them. But I can’t. I—I wasn’t even touching the plate, it just—I don’t know what happened—”

Scott tapes off the end of the gauze, then sits on the side of the tub, doing his best to look into Jimmy’s eyes without forcing him. Jimmy’s biting his lip, hands shaking, looking for all the world like he’s about to bolt.

“It’s just a plate,” Scott says, trying in some way to convey the fact that he doesn’t care what Jimmy breaks, he’s not going to kick him out.

Jimmy shakes his head, quick and repetitive. “It’s just a plate today. It’s—it’s the doorknob tomorrow, and your car the day after, and then it’s your leg or—or—” he cuts himself off, swallowing thickly. “It’s—it’s nothing. Forget it.”

And before Scott can stop him, Jimmy rises on shaky legs and leaves the room, arms clutched around himself.

-

It’s times like these that Scott really misses Aeor.

He’s never taught anyone this kind of thing. He’s never even seen anyone else be taught—and his lessons in control had been far later than most might receive them.

But he decides to start with Jimmy the same way Aeor had started with him—proving that his mistakes aren’t harmful.

Scott’s hand hovers over the dishes in the cabinet. A stack of nine dinner plates, once ten. Five bowls. Eight dessert plates. Four mugs, four saucers.

He never uses half the stuff, particularly not the mugs and saucers—he’s bought his own, more casual mugs in recent years. And a quick internet search shows him that he could replace the entire set for relatively cheap, though they wouldn’t be identical.

The main issue is that these are dishes that came from Aeor. Dishes that he used.

It only takes a second for Scott to come to the conclusion that Aeor would prefer these dishes be put to use to help someone, rather than gather dust in the cabinet.

So Scott piles all of the dishes in the backyard, just beyond his little flower garden. He’s got a decent-sized backyard with a privacy fence, which he thinks will do quite nicely. If they stand on the patio, the fence isn’t too far away, yet not right in their faces. Still, a bit of protective gear is in order.

He manages to scrounge up two pairs of safety glasses and three pairs of work gloves in the garage, all of which he sets out next to the dishes on the patio. Then he turns the oven on, sets a frozen pizza to cook, and heads upstairs to find Jimmy.

Scott knocks gently on the door. “Jimmy? Can I talk to you?”

What feels like ages passes with no sound. Scott’s poised to knock again, mind racing through various possibilities—did he run again? Is he hurt?—before he hears movement inside.

It’s still another full minute before the door opens, revealing a rather miserable-looking Jimmy.

His hair is all rumpled, like he hasn’t gotten out of bed all day. His t-shirt is half tucked into his jeans, half sticking out under his hoodie. The constant shadows under his eyes have only deepened, ringing the redness that rims them. The tip of his nose is red to match, and he sniffles as he stands there, waiting for Scott to speak.

Scott clears his throat, takes a slight step back (he doesn’t want Jimmy to feel like he has no personal space). “Um, I started on dinner, but I was hoping I could have your help with something? In the backyard?”

It’s an agonizingly long moment that Jimmy takes to think it over, but eventually he bites his lip and nods, rocking back on his heels as he waits for Scott to lead the way.

Scott does so, pausing by the front door so that Jimmy can slip on his shoes, then leads him out the back.

“I don’t want you to ever feel unsafe here, all right?” Scott begins, putting on a pair of safety glasses. Jimmy stares at the glasses, the gloves, and the dishes, before cautiously taking the other pair, eyes flicking up toward Scott every so often.

“I accidentally froze something when I was seventeen, and my parents kicked me out. I always thought that was just the way it was—I had to be perfect with my powers, always, and my lack of control was . . . well, I spent a long time hating myself for those accidents.”

Scott pulls on his work gloves, still stained with dirt from the last time he tended his garden. Jimmy surveys the two remaining pairs before choosing the larger ones, biting his lip as he gingerly pulls them on over his bandaged hands.

“I didn’t figure out until—or, Aeor taught me—” Jimmy flinches at the name, but Scott carries on— “that you’re expected to make mistakes. Nobody knows how to control their powers at first. It’s a . . . it’s a learning curve, see?”

Jimmy shrugs. And that’s fine—Scott’s fairly sure it’s a quiet day. It’s just difficult to work with at the moment. He just barely restrains from pinching the bridge of his nose, remembering at the last second that he’s wearing dirty work gloves. How had Aeor ever managed this with teenage Scott?

“From what I understand,” says Scott, “you couldn’t control your powers until . . . recently. And now, you’re thinking that maybe you can’t, because you used them accidentally?”

Jimmy looks away, throat bobbing. He shrugs again.

“Right. So, first of all, this is normal. It’s sort of like—like you’re going through puberty again, okay? You’re going through the learning-to-control stage for the first time, so you’re going to mess up. It happens. I messed up so many times—I used to freeze over the floor when I was angry. I used to be terrible at control, but I just needed someone to help.”

Hopefully that part of the lesson has gotten through to Jimmy. He’s observed, in the month that Jimmy’s been here, that even on quiet days he’s listening more often than not. Scott sucks in a breath, hoping that some air will loosen the stressed knot in his chest, and picks up a bowl.

“So, mistakes are really common. And, Jimmy, I don’t really . . . understand your power, I guess, but things are going to break while you learn how to control. And I just . . . I want to make sure you know it’s okay. It’s okay to break things, okay?”

And with that, Scott chucks the bowl at the fence at the other end of the yard.

It collides with a smash, shards of porcelain flying apart at the impact. Jimmy takes a startled step back, reminding Scott wildly of a spooked horse.

He acts like he doesn’t notice, though, instead handing Jimmy a dinner plate.

Jimmy glances at him, unsure, as he takes it. Scott smiles in a way that he hopes is encouraging, points to the fence.

“Go for it. Don’t hold back.”

Jimmy’s certainly holding back when he throws the plate, but it breaks anyhow, snapping in half against the fence. Scott hears him gasp, but when he looks back at him, Jimmy’s as stoic as ever.

Scott picks up another dinner plate and tosses it, feeling an odd sort of satisfaction echo through his bones as it breaks against the fence. He hands Jimmy a bowl, and with noticeably less trepidation, Jimmy throws it at the fence.

It’s a weird bonding activity, to be sure. Not the weirdest—Scott can remember some of the bonding stuff the theatre folk he worked with in college got up to—but it definitely ranks up there as something probably socially unacceptable.

He throws the next dish even harder.

“Things are going to break,” Scott reiterates, handing Jimmy one of the mugs. “I broke things. You’ll break things. You’re not going to be in trouble for it—you’re an adult, and I plan to treat you like one, all right? And I plan to help you learn how to control it. You’re not alone in this.”

Jimmy hurls a saucer with all his strength, and Scott thinks he sees a shadow of a smile when it shatters against the fence. He does it again with a dinner plate, then steps back, allowing Scott to throw a few more.

When it comes down to the last dish—a dinner plate—Scott hands it to Jimmy, gestures for him to take a good stance. Jimmy doesn’t hesitate; he sends the plate flying into the fence, and this time he definitely smiles a bit when it breaks.

“Jimmy,” Scott says seriously when the man, panting a little bit, turns back to him. “I want you to know—there is nothing in this house that you can break that will make me stop caring about you. As your conservator—and more importantly, as your friend, I place your health and happiness above anything that I own. I want you to remember that, okay?”

Jimmy nods, and Scott’s struck by the sudden, overwhelming urge to hug him. He doesn’t, of course—Jimmy doesn’t really do well with touch, and that’s fine by Scott. He really, really wants to, though.

Instead, he tugs off his gloves and jerks his head in the direction of the backdoor. “I put a pizza in the oven, it should be done soon. Want to find something on Netflix and just hang out for the rest of the night?”

Of course, Jimmy doesn’t say anything. But he offers a small smile, shakes off his gloves, and places his safety glasses on the patio table. Then he steps around Scott and heads inside.

That night, they eat pizza on paper plates while watching an episode of a new suspense show. When the drama peaks, the light in the living room fizzles and goes out—and while Jimmy flinches hard and hides his face, Scott reassures him that it’s fine until he reemerges, forcing out a raspy apology, but agreeing to finish the episode.