Who: Louis and Neil What: An altercation. Where: Neil's apartment. When: Immediately following their phone conversation. Warnings/Rating: Sadness and some blood.
Once, Louis had been shy. He had feigned confidence in social interactions, and had felt the kind of crippling self-doubt that relied on isolation to thrive. He still felt that, much of the time. What had changed? His family.
There had been a time where Louis was required only to be confident in the quality of his work, and he could be, at least in that. He had been reserved, and if there had been any anger to him, he had kept it intact but under the surface.
It had been a year and a half now of everything going wrong, going wrong, going wrong, over and over, and over and over trying to pick up everyone else’s pieces. He had cobbled together a group of people who he thought were family, people he loved and wanted to be safe and happy, and the rest of the world continually beat those people down.
Over and over, Louis tried to put the pieces back together. Each time an attack came, from the outside or the inside, he got angrier. Why couldn’t things just be safe, and happy, and normal? Why couldn’t Neil and Sam just communicate, for once? Why couldn’t people just leave Sam alone? Why couldn’t anyone stay clean? Why did Ian ever have to come to town? Why did Evan have to fall off the wagon and crash his car?
Throughout it all, the old self-doubt nagged, and ate, and bit, and it never actually went away. It just got buried deeper. Louis kept trying to lead the charge in situations where he really didn’t know what to do, kept trying to patch the hull enough to keep the boat afloat, and that self-doubt reminded him every time the hasty patch dissolved that he had failed once again, that he really wasn’t the man for the job. The self-doubt whispered that if someone better had taken on this responsibility, they would have been able to do it all, and do it right. Self-loathing and frustration collided and spun together into rage.
Then Neil had the gall to tell him he wasn’t the right person for ‘this’, for him. He didn’t have the energy or the time to deal with Louis, and Louis lost it. Bad enough when Joey had served as such a harsh reminder of his failure, but for Neil of all people, to tell him that he wasn’t the person to help, after all the work Louis had poured into keeping him and Sam together, all the energy that he had spent trying to keep him off booze - living in his apartment, for the love of God, just to keep him on the straight and narrow - he was too much, now?
The betrayal was breathtaking, like being shoved off the tightrope he’d been dancing along. That was why Louis knocked on Neil’s door at eleven at night, an hour or so after Neil hung up the phone. Louis was slight, but he was tall, and he’d kept in shape from his days with the police. Despite appearances, he knew how to fight. He’d learned years ago, when he got tired of getting knocked around by boys in school, and it had served him well during both his stint in the police force and his work as a private detective. It was with a certain kind of determined accuracy, then, that Louis punched Neil in the face as soon as the door was open wide enough to do so, a sharp right cross to the jaw. He wasn’t going to knock Neil off his feet. He didn’t have the weight for that, not against his brother. But he might just knock a few teeth loose.
Hanging up on Louis had, admittedly, not been his finest moment, but Neil was just about done with feeling like he destroyed every damn thing he touched. Sam was fucked up beyond belief and he’d only made her worse despite trying, time and time again, to fix his mistakes and make things better. And then there was Louis, who shouldered all the weight on his own, and how the hell was he supposed to help when he couldn’t even help himself, much less anyone else? His brand of help only did more damage, instead of repairing what already existed. Hell, he’d called to make sure Louis was okay and instead it became about him and his failure all over again. What happened, and what had he done, and he just didn’t feel like rehashing how he’d messed up things with Sam, again, when he hadn’t called to talk about himself in the first place.
So yeah, no, he wasn’t the right person to help Louis. He wasn’t the right person to help anyone. Even when he tried, his own shortcomings somehow seemed to be the only thing people could focus on.
When the knock at the door came, he was trying to list off reasons why having a drink was a bad idea. Part of him knew he wouldn’t really do it, wouldn’t really give in, but he could pretend. Eleven o’clock and he hadn’t ordered takeout, but Neil got up and he went to the door anyway, and even when he saw who it was, he still opened it. Maybe Louis had come over to chew him out. Well, fine. He began to say as much, but then a fist came at him out of fucking nowhere and, while it wasn’t enough force to knock him backward, he did stumble backwards, a combination of the blow itself and the sheer unexpectedness of it. Neil had height and bulk, but he wasn’t a rough-and-tumble kind of guy; he didn’t get in fights very often. It hurt, and he tasted blood, and he brought a hand to his jaw, gingerly, a mixture of disbelief and anger as he looked at his brother. Whatever he’d thought Louis had come for, it wasn’t this.
“That make you feel better?”
Neil wasn't supposed to reel and then stand up straight. He was supposed to engage, to hit back, to actually feel something about it. Louis was so livid that his now bruised fist was shaking. They had never been the sort of family that got in physical altercations. No, their parents would have completely disapproved of such an undignified conrontation. Arguments were meant to happen with words, behind closed doors, and create psychic wounds that stuck years longer than any bruise could manage. The impulse to punch Neil wasn't a very Donovan thing to do - no, most likely it was those Alexander genes expressing themselves.
Whatever Louis had thought he would get from punching Neil in the face, he didn't in the moments following, and he stared at him instead. He was so angry, still, that he felt sick. But what was he going to do? Just punch Neil again? That idea, suddenly, seemed perfect. "No," he said, and struck again, body punch this time. He could hear his blood in his ears, lips pulled back from his teeth in a rictus of fury.
Shit like this had never happened when they were kids, or when they were teenagers, or even when they entered into that young adult stage when they were finally all grown up but hadn’t yet left behind the carefree youth that often lingered into one’s early twenties. Neil tried to remember the last time he’d seen Louis hit someone, and he came up blank. No, Donovans didn’t get into fistfights. They used their words. He was sure their parents would have simultaneous heart attacks if they’d witnessed what had just occurred, and honestly, he wasn’t expecting Louis to hit him again. Maybe he should have been, but he wasn’t. He figured it was a one-time thing, and then he’d either storm out or start yelling.
Apparently not.
Maybe fighting back was the wrong thing to do. Maybe he deserved this and more. But Neil wasn’t going to just stand there and take it, not without defending himself. He was angry, too, and the second blow elicited a grunt of pain that only made him angrier. “What the hell, Louis,” he snapped, swinging high and knuckles connecting with his cheekbone.
Louis' head snapped back with the second punch. Neil was stronger than he was and had girth on him, so it was harder for him to absorb the punch. He stumbled back onto one foot, seeing black for the briefest of moments, and when he went in for Neil again it was more instinct than anything else. He threw the whole of his weight into Neil. There was no thought in it really, just anger, and the unwillingness to stop until he felt it was done. Not yet. Not by a long shot. Neil's unwillingness to speak to him had spun upward and out in his mind, an act representative of all the insanity of late, all the horror, all his own failings and the failings of those around him. It had become representative of the nightmare his life had turned into, but given a face, an identity. No one would help him. He was a failure, and no one else would step up to the plate. If there was a moment when he felt as if he had actually cracked, it was then, when he slammed his shoulder toward his brother's chest, white blank with rage.
Somewhere beneath his anger Neil felt a stab of regret when his blow met its mark, and he watched as Louis stumbled backward, torn between falling back himself or seizing the opportunity to cause more damage. For a second he faltered, shoulders beginning to lose some of their tension, but then Louis came at him again and made his decision for him. This went beyond him hanging up on his brother, he knew that much. It was so much more than one bad conversation. He tried not to react, but all the old bitterness welled up and he raised an arm to fend off the attack, digging in his heels and refusing to let Louis's weight knock him off balance. He resisted, and when his shoulder slammed against his chest he let out a pained wheeze before retaliating on instinct, fingers digging into Louis' shoulders and using his own weight to push, a fierce shove back and down.
Louis' feet slipped unceremoniously out from under him, as Neil shoved him back. He went down face first, and while he got one hand beneath him on his way down, it wasn't enough to avoid a sharp crack to his nose and jaw. He let out a short, pained sound, scrabbling a push back, doing his best to stumble to his feet while still holding his nose. It was gushing blood.
Louis was still sick with anger, and now, on top of it, he was ashamed. It didn't take more than a second to put together that he'd broken his nose, and the sensation that flooded him then was terrifically familiar, the embarrassment of being unable to defend himself when taking on someone bigger and stronger. Worse still, he'd initiated this. He had no one but himself to blame. He didn't even make eye contact with Neil, just took a few short staggering steps toward the stairs, one hand clutching his nose, intent on getting far away from here as quickly as he possibly could.
All it took was the sight of blood to switch off his anger, as though the crackling flames that spurred him onward had been doused with cold water in the blink of an eye. Neil was horrified, thinking for one wild moment that, somehow, he'd hurt Louis grievously without intending to, but then he saw the way he held his nose and realized the crack had been bone breaking. That didn't make him feel much better, though, and he was just as ashamed of himself as Louis was, with some self-loathing thrown in. What was wrong with him? His brother hadn't posed any real threat; he should have known better than to retaliate. He shouldn't have fought back.
Torn between hanging back and doing something, anything, he lingered in the doorway, expression pained. "I'm sorry," was all he could come up with. Fucking pathetic.
Louis didn't respond. He couldn't even bring himself to look back. In all likelihood, he should have apologized too. But he couldn't bring himself to deepen his own humiliation that way, not now. Maybe later, when the dust had settled. For now, he ducked into the stairway, heading down, down and out of sight.