Sticks & Stones

Even though it had been Earl’s unusual methods that kept Ty walking much longer than he should have been able, Ty’s father had still been seriously out of line. Zane would never wish him real harm, but he seriously hoped the man understood and regretted what he’d done.



“Everything okay?” Zane asked as he stopped next to the older man, meaning it in general terms.



Earl turned his head slightly and gave him a weak smile and a nod. He turned back to look into the room, covering his mouth with his hand and sighing. Ty was asleep in the bed, hooked up to several IVs and his color looking better than he had even an hour before. Deuce sprawled in a chair beside the bed, snoring softly. Zane had just walked Mara downstairs to the truck; she was heading home with Chester to pack them all some clean clothes and would return in a couple hours.



“Do you know why Ty joined the FBI?” Earl asked Zane abruptly.



Zane shrugged as he leaned against the doorframe. He had lots of little pieces to Ty’s puzzle: the “official” story of why he’d left the Marines, which was complete bullshit according to Ty; that his last partner had been killed in the line of duty, even though Ty had tried to take the bullet for him; that he’d known Dick Burns since he was in diapers.



“Not exactly,” Zane answered.



Earl glanced at him and smiled sadly. “He joined the FBI ’cause his daddy’s best friend asked him to,” he told Zane softly, looking back into the room to make certain Ty and Deuce were both still asleep.



Burns. Zane didn’t comment; if Earl needed to spill his guts, he could do it. But Zane was the wrong person to be looking to for any sort of absolution. He didn’t forgive and forget easily, not when he could still see the pain in Ty’s eyes.



Earl nodded in response to his silence, his eyes still on his sons. “Richard was paying me a visit one weekend a while back, and he was talking about work,” he told Zane. “He didn’t like what he was doing. Said he didn’t trust any of the agents he was working with to get the job done. I remember sitting there and him looking at me with defeat on his face. He was talking about early retirement. He said to me, ‘Earl, if I had just one good man I could count on, I could get a lot of good done’.”



Earl swallowed heavily, cocked his head, and then turned and met Zane’s eyes. “I told him where to find Ty.”



“You say that like you think it was a mistake,” Zane observed, shaking his head.



“It didn’t give Ty much choice, me sending Richard to him,” Earl answered flatly.



“No. It didn’t.”



Earl nodded again, as if knowing he deserved the harsh words. “Richard and I never gave a thought to what he wanted or to how dangerous it was,” he said, the words quiet and solemn. “We just… we just thought Ty could handle it and carried on from there. And Ty… he’d do anything to meet what he felt like were our expectations,” he told Zane as he lowered his head in apparent shame and turned away from the door, beginning to walk slowly down the hall. “Even when he was a young’un, he never made an excuse not to follow me into those mines. He was scared to death of ’em,” he told Zane with a tremble in his voice. Zane realized the older man was on the verge of tearing up. “I almost lost him today,” he said, almost to himself. He gave a soft snort and shook his head. “A damn wildcat,” he murmured.



“I guess he figured he’d done everything spectacular already,” Zane said, looking over his shoulder to glance inside the room. He didn’t have to study Earl to know the man was worried. He was worried, himself. Zane frowned. As angry as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to be cold and cruel to a father so obviously torn up over mistakes he’d made with his son.



How many harsh words had Zane himself said to Ty to light a fire under the man? Anyone who knew him knew that the best way to make Ty dangerous was to make him angry. It made him a useful weapon.



“He’s going to be okay,” Zane finally settled on. He didn’t want to think about the alternative. He wondered if this was how Ty had felt when it had been him three-quarters dead in a hospital bed. Right now he felt helpless. He was hurting. He was scared that he might have lost something he wasn’t even sure he’d had, and there hadn’t been a damn thing he could’ve done about it. “He’s strong,” he said to Earl confidently.



Earl stopped with his back to Zane, and he looked up at the ceiling of the hallway. “I know he is,” he responded with a hint of pride in his voice. “But he thinks that’s enough,” he said as he turned and met Zane’s eyes again. “I’m relieved to see he has a good man with him,” he told Zane solemnly. “Someone to watch his back.”



Zane flinched in surprise. That wasn’t something he’d have expected to hear from Earl Grady.



Earl nodded as he observed Zane’s reaction. “I don’t just say pretty words to hear myself talk, son,” he informed him. “I mean it. Thank you for….” He was forced to look away and swallow hard as his voice faltered. He pressed his lips together tightly as he fought to regain control.



It was clear, seeing Earl’s emotions bubble to the surface, that Earl was being truthful. It gave Zane an odd, bittersweet feeling of vindication. He’d proved himself to Earl Grady—but Ty had been seriously wounded in the process. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly, watching the older man, wondering if Earl planned to apologize to Ty as well. “You might keep that in mind the next time you talk with Ty.”



Earl looked back at him and lifted his chin, obviously still fighting back his emotions. “Keep what in mind, son?” he asked, managing to make his voice even once more.



“You owe him a hell of a lot more than just pretty words.” Zane paused, his banked anger melting into a quiet, pained sadness. “I don’t know what you thought you were doing, but you couldn’t have said anything that would have hurt him more.”



Earl was silent as he took a few steps toward the doorway and stared into Ty’s room. The guilt and worry were clear on his face, written in the lines around his eyes and mouth. “I know,” he whispered. “I’ll never be able to apologize enough. I’ll never be able to make that up to him. But never for one second have I thought my son was anything but what he is.”



Zane was silent. There was a big difference between thought and deed, and what Earl had said up on that mountain was unforgivable. Earl sighed heavily and nodded in agreement as if he’d heard Zane’s last thought loud and clear.



Deuce came shuffling out of the room, rubbing his eyes and yawning, and Zane wondered if he’d heard any of his conversation with Earl.



“How is he?” Earl asked in a whisper.



“Talking in his sleep,” Deuce answered in a low voice.



“What’s he saying?” Earl asked with a frown.



“I don’t know,” Deuce answered with a shrug as he looked at Zane and gave him a small smile. “I don’t think it’s even English.”



“Might be Farsi,” Zane murmured.



“Could be,” Deuce responded with a closer look at Zane, as if he hadn’t expected Zane to know Ty spoke Farsi. “But I think it’s just slurred cursing.”



Zane snorted. “You going to sit with him?” he asked Earl as he stepped back to give Deuce room to get through the door.



Earl’s expression became more guarded, and he looked back into the room where his son lay muttering to himself. He shook his head in answer. “Not just yet. I’m gonna go hunt down some coffee,” he said gruffly, and then he turned away and headed down the hallway, walking with his shoulders squared and tense.



Zane turned his eyes to Deuce. “He needs someone to talk to,” he said with a sigh before rubbing his eyes.



“Dude,” Deuce responded wryly. “I’m a fucking psychiatrist, and he won’t talk to me,” he pointed out.



A short laugh got out before Zane could stop it. “Deuce, you know we love you. But we hate you.”



“Yeah, yeah,” Deuce muttered as he turned around and looked back into Ty’s room. “The whole family likes to screw with other people’s heads. I’m just the only one who took it pro. But,” he added with a slightly darker undertone as he looked at his brother, “Dad can sit and stew over this one for all I care.” He turned his head and peered at Zane. “What’d he say to you?” he asked.



Zane took the opportunity to move into Ty’s sterile-looking, sparsely decorated room as he considered how to answer. He didn’t want to get into a mini-showdown with Deuce, even though it sounded as if Deuce was just as angry at Earl as Zane was. The only person who didn’t seem to be seething over what had been said was Ty. Still, Zane didn’t want to insult their father and make Deuce feel the need to defend him.



“He’s worried about Ty,” he answered as neutrally as possible. “About this and maybe his mental state in general. He was talking about why Ty joined the Bureau.”



Deuce looked at him closely, then sighed and shook his head. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” he muttered dejectedly. “Dick’s little side jobs,” he said bitterly. “Ty’s told me he’s afraid one day we’ll get word he was killed in a car wreck or something equally innocuous because he was on some secret mission they can’t make public.”



Zane glanced at Deuce, frowning hard. He had no idea what the man was talking about. He’d never heard about any secret missions or side jobs, although he supposed that might have been what Ty was doing when they were separated after the Tri-State case and Zane had been unable to track him down. He himself had been thrown back undercover, after all. With Ty being so close to the Assistant Director, there was no telling what sort of work he was trusted to undertake.



“The thing that always made Ty so good at everything he did was that he had no fear. Makes Ma and Dad sick with worry,” Deuce continued with a sigh.



“He’s afraid of things just like we are,” Zane said as he turned his eyes on his restless partner. “He just hides it well.”



“Yeah?” Deuce asked in what sounded like honest surprise. Whether it was surprise that Zane knew that or surprise that his brother was afraid of things, Zane didn’t know. “Like what?” Deuce asked.



Zane didn’t look away from Ty as he resisted the urge to touch him, just his arm, his shoulder, something to reassure himself that Ty really was there and breathing. “The mines, for one,” he answered. “Seems reasonable to me. Small, dark spaces to get trapped in.”



Deuce watched Zane as he sat down beside the bed again. “He tell you that?” he asked.



“Yeah,” Zane glanced up as he slid his hands in his pockets. It was easier to keep them to himself that way. “I made the mistake of waking him up once, when he was doing this.” He nodded down to Ty’s active sleeping. “Figured it was a bad dream.”



“Made the mistake,” Deuce echoed. “What happened?”



Zane finally looked over at Deuce. “Oh, he didn’t hit me or anything before he woke up,” he said as the corner of his mouth turned up. “But he sure was cranky once I got his attention.” His eyes slid back to Ty. It had to be the IV keeping him under now, he thought clinically. Ty usually woke up in a snap if he sensed someone close. That, or he wasn’t getting better, and that didn’t bear thinking about at all.



“You’re lucky you just got cranky instead of hit,” Deuce told him fondly.



“Yeah,” Zane agreed. “After he woke up, we had a talk about things we were afraid of. How we might die. Heights. Small places with bugs,” he listed off.



Deuce smiled and nodded. He looked back down at Ty, but the smile fell as he watched his brother toss and turn. “Ty has a lot of bad dreams,” he said to Zane, his voice sad.



Zane wondered what Deuce expected him to say about that. Of course, the man had no idea that Zane was living with the same problem. “That’s why he keeps quiet, you know.”



Deuce looked up at him, still frowning. “Why?” he asked.



“So you don’t have bad dreams. So your mom and dad don’t have bad dreams.”



Deuce looked at him for a long time before the corner of his mouth twitched into a smile. He nodded and returned his attention to Ty. “You know him better than you think you do,” he said thoughtfully. “You want something to drink?” he asked as he pushed himself out of his chair.



“Yeah, sure,” Zane answered as he rolled his shoulders back and realized he still had his jacket on from his last cigarette break. He shrugged out of it and tossed it over the small rolling tray table that had been pushed to the side.



“Back in a minute,” Deuce said to him as he left, patting Ty’s bare foot as he passed the end of the bed.



Ty groaned as the door to the room clicked when Deuce opened it, and his foot twitched where he’d been touched. Zane shook his head. The last time they’d been together in a hospital room, it had been him in the bed. He remembered it hazily because he’d been so drugged. But he could still see the upset expression on Ty’s face when he’d announced that he had to leave while Zane had to stay. He remembered a short, gentle kiss. And he remembered the guilt on Ty’s face when he’d told Ty to go while he was too drugged to stop him.



Sighing, Zane paced around the bed and sat in the chair crammed between the bed and the window. As he sat down, the chair jarred the bed a little. Ty flailed under the thin hospital sheet, both arms and both feet coming off the bed like a baby who’d been startled. His IV rattled, and the plastic side rails of the bed banged noisily as Ty gasped and tried to sit up.