Page 58 of Fire
“The mail,” Tobias repeated.“They. There’s... there’s more than...” He had to tip forward again, try to breathe, try to do anything other than run screaming, drag Jake back to the Eldorado, and drive where the Director could never find them.
“Come on, let’s get up, let’s... let’s go lie down.”
“I d-dropped the beer,” Tobias said.
“I don’t care. Hey, can you stand up? Stay with me, come on.”
Jake helped him to their bedroom, locking the front door as they passed it, and completely ignoring the bottles of beer that he had left scattered (but hadn’t broken, some distant part of Tobias was thankful) on the doorstep. Jake got him to their bed, and then got in after him, holding him so tight that Tobias thought that maybe Jake’s arms would hold him together.
Tobias held on and trembled as old memories flashed through him like an electric shock.
“It’s okay, Toby,” Jake said over and over. “You’re here with me. I won’t let him... he’s not here, I swear it.”
It took a damn long time for Tobias to stop shaking, for Jake’s warmth to help him feel less like he was going to shake out of his skin. But even then, he neither slept nor made any move to get up, just stayed in their bed, staring at the wall, exhausted and terrified and frozen down to his bones by That Voice, and the thought that the Director could be there, his knife cutting into Jake.
Very late, when he probably thought Tobias was asleep, Jake got out of the bed and closed the bedroom door softly behind him. Tobias felt him go, but couldn’t get up, couldn’t cry out.Don’t, he thought.Don’t get his voice in your head.
When the flicker of light under the doorway told him that Jake had turned on the TV, Tobias curled up in the bed, pressed a pillow over his head, and tried to hold himself together.
* * *
Tobias may have beenthe one who had the panic attack, but as Jake held him in their bed, he also felt wrecked, shaky. Even the thirty, maybe forty minutes he had watched on that first tape had been... devastating. And it was only one of an entire fucking box.
He’d known, okay, or thought he’d known. After years of loving Tobias, of growing with him, of alternately sidestepping, adapting, or barreling straight through the things that had left him shaking, Jake thought he had a pretty good picture of what Tobias had experienced, what left him afraid and withdrawn at times. Jake had thought he knew how much he should hate everyone who had ever touched Tobias. He had thought he knew how strong Tobias was.
He’d been so fucking wrong.
After Tobias fell asleep, Jake couldn’t stop himself. He told himself that he was just going to get up and grab the milk and beer from the doorstep, make sure he hadn’t broken the TV when he pulled the plug out in a panic, but he knew he was lying to himself.
Once the food was put away, he ended up back in front of the TV. He plugged it back in, and the screen came up blue and waiting. Jake stood there for a long minute. Then, careful to set the volume just above mute, he pushed play on the VCR with a finger that trembled.
Jake didn’t look away, except for the minutes he lost emptying his guts in the bathroom. Each time he thought he could get the video out of his head, the look of terror and agony on that younger Tobias’s face always rose up and hit him like a punch to the solar plexus. Like a... like a motherfucking cattle prod. Those fucking sons of bitches.
Jake nearly drove his knuckles into the wall, but stopped himself just in time, remembering Tobias asleep in their room, remembering that it was all in the past. Even if it was a past that they lived with every day, and where every one of the sadistic motherfuckers responsible walked free.
Eventually, he took the bathroom’s garbage can with him to the living room, so he wouldn’t risk Tobias coming out to the video playing while Jake was bending over the toilet.
* * *
Hours later,halfway through the second tape, a noise in the hallway snapped Jake out of the transfixed, living nightmare he’d sunk into. When Tobias appeared at the edge of the living room, Jake hastily slapped at the remote, first accidentally unmuting it, and then managing to hit mute, then pause. Shock and the horror of what he had been watching made his hands numb and uncoordinated on the buttons.
Tobias neither said a word nor acknowledged anything, looking only at the table with the tapes spread across it. He picked one up and looked at the label for a long minute. Jake watched him, knowing he ought to say something, but he had no words left inside him, nothing but a ragged scream set to escape the moment he opened his mouth.
In one quick movement, Tobias raised the tape up and brought it down, smashing it hard onto his knee. The plastic case broke, chunks of it and the tape ribbon falling to the carpet while Tobias ripped at the ribbon left in his hands, stomping on the pieces with his bare heel. That got Jake scrambling to his feet, just as Tobias reached for another tape.
“Toby—”
“Who sent these?” Tobias cracked the tape against the table edge, then let it fall and reached for the box and wrappings, yanking them to him as he searched for a return address. “Who? Who did this to us, Jake?”
“I don’t—there’s no names, except on the tapes—Toby, stop, wait.” Jake snatched the next tape out of Tobias’s grasp. “I haven’t seen that one?—”
“They’re trying to destroy you!” Tobias screamed, and Jake froze. Tobias was staring him in the eye, his own eyes wild under his tangled bangs. “Don’t you—can’t you see—” Tobias’s voice was ragged, barely controlled. He gestured at the tapes and packaging between them with a shaking hand. “Whoever did this—they’re trying to wreck us.You don’t need to see these.They want to ruin us, Jake.”
Jake had no answer. Exhaustion, rage and pain had fogged his mind. Now that Tobias had said it, he saw how true it was: the mystery of the tapes, moments designed to rip Tobias, or maybe Jake, apart. But that didn’t change his desperate need to keep watching, to see everything, like a bloody wound that needed to be stitched shut. Tobias had protected him from all of this, and now, confronted by the truth in cheap video, Jake had to watch to the end.
The truth will set you free. Who had said that to him? Probably Alex.
“I don’t know, Toby,” Jake said. “I don’t know who sent them, I don’t know why. But I have to... I can’t...” Then Jake looked down at the tape he had wrested from Tobias’s hands, seeking some kind of answer, and saw the name Roger Harper on the label.
