Jordan Wadcock is an Enlgish honey badger (badgering) wrote in thebefore, @ 2010-01-25 22:49:00 |
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As a general rule, Brennan never talks about his family. Questions about his home life are always carefully hedged and deflected. It's a skill he has been perfecting since Jason mentally became Brennan. And no, the irony isn't lost on him, but Brennan is his father. The heroic ghost he never knew, whose death lingers over all of his life like heavy rain clouds. But the fact of the matter was Greg Brennan was a good man, or at least Brennan is perfectly sure he had to be if for no other reason than growing up Brennan - Jason then - needed to love someone and a dead man seemed to be the best fit. At least the dead couldn't do anything to fall from grace. However, when he does pause to consider the complexity and confusing personal feelings wrapped up in such a simple word like family he can come to a number of conclusions. 1. Ken Harrington is the exact opposite of everything that Greg Brennan ever was and never would be. Ken had always been around, a fishmonger, who in public always had kind words and a strong shoulder for Lena. It doesn't really come as a surprise when his mother doesn't quite look at Jason, definitely Jason then at only six years old, and tells him that Ken is new daddy. Jason doesn't trust the look in Ken's eyes and refuses to call him anything other than Ken (although in a few short years there will be a whole slew of words to call the man). It starts as a perfectly normal Tuesday when that look becomes something more. Jason has had a long day and not just because he's been picked on again, but because no one has really looked at him. They all look past him, his mother, Gillian, his teacher, afraid to meet his eyes (you have your father's eyes, they say). His mother is out for the afternoon doing goodness knows what and he's been forced into helping Ken with the fish when a cold barrel of smelt he's moving boils over and some of the fish manage to explode. And that's gets a few people to really look at him (although never the eyes). He tries to explain, he does really, although how he can start to explain another in an odd line of things he doesn't know? Ken's had enough. Muttering to himself, he pulls Jason across his knee and whoops him real hard, tears pearl from his eyes, breath hitching in his throat. His whole backside is on fire, and he can't help but cry. It earns him no pity. Jason returns home with a slight hesitance in his step and squirms in his seat because sitting just irritates it more when he's forced to sit at the table, but not allowed to eat. He stares at his mother, willing her to look at him because she knows (mothers always do), but she makes even more of even effort to divert her gaze elsewhere. Greg Brennan would never hit anyone, Gillian tells him later. No, he would just sit you down at the table and look at you all sad like telling you how disappointed he was. It's the first time Gillian's ever offered information of their father and on the tail end of his first spanking he's not sure what to make of it. 2. Holidays, especially birthdays, are a time to find a good hiding place away from everyone else rather than something ever to be celebrated. It goes without saying that the 20th of October is not a day that is celebrated in the Brennan household, not that it can simlpy pass without some sort of notice. As Jason grows, he makes great efforts to be as scarce as he can on the day (when he's much older he'll take to alcohol and women in hopes of forgetting it all together). Most times he just heads down to the bay and wades ankle deep starring out at the horizon. He's never gone farther in, afraid that it's vastness might swallow him like it did his father and he's not sure if he wants it to be that easy on everyone else. Part of him is glad his presence makes them hurt. And the part that keeps him close to sure is fueled by the fleeting misplaced encouraging words from his mother. Sometimes he gets presents on the other holidays, it's mostly useful things like a new jumper for school or a pair of sneakers. However, the first Christmas that marks Ken officially as his step-father and his mother is pissed beyond recognition, Brennan receives what he thinks to be his first real present. For a moment, the Brennan shield dissipates with the excitement because not only is his mother actually sort of looking at him, he has a real present under the tree and had really been wanting that new hand held gaming system. Overcome by joy, he doesn't fully notice the twisted look on Ken's face as he leans in the doorway watching the child. Jason slides to the floor reaching for that perfectly sized present, his heart swelling because finally, finally he's getting what he wants. His fingers are too eager he struggles to tear the paper off, revealing the box he knew was in there. Jason's face lights up and he glances back to his mother who gives him a dazed half smile and this moment couldn't be more right. He keeps going, only as he starts to open the box the weight seems off. And doubt trickles slowly back into that momentarily joy. Jason peels back the lid to find nothing more than a few rocks from the beach and the sand that was stuck to him. As his heart starts to break, a hearty rises from the too casual figure of Ken behind him. "Devil children aren't even good enough for coal." Later that night, Jason, who is definitely Brennan again, takes a knife to Ken's favorite chair, ripping it to shreds. It seems only fair. 3. The belt only hurts, drawing blood, if he squirms too much and that's his fault too. It's not long before Ken silently decides that Jason has built up a tolerance to his hand. He hasn't, but Brennan has and that's just because Brennan is invincible, he gets into fights at the school yard (winning them when he wants to), relishing in the new scars that speckle his body because at least he chose to create those. The first time Ken pulls out his belt, he is stone cold sober (he's always sober and Brennan isn't sure if that makes it better or worse). Brennan isn't scared, he thinks how much damage can a strap do? He's had worse. And he's wrong of course because he jerks at the first whack lands across his bottom, jerking just enough for the edge of the belt to graze the revealed span of skin where his shirt rose away from the top of his pants. It stings and he jerks again as the second hit falls, only getting worse. The tears are coming again, but Brennan doesn't cry. Jason cries. Jason also still holds onto the belief that mother will come home and save him (Brennan has stopped looking at the woman all together because she fills him with the same amount of hate that Ken does). When it's over, Ken chides him, telling him how he only ever makes things worse. How he's killing his mother and how he'll never be anything. That night, Brennan runs out to the bay, out into the cold water the salt stinging the fresh wounds. He plunges under the water (although he's not in that deep, still afraid to be swept away) and screams into the ocean that took both his father and his mother. He's not sure how long he's there before Gillian finds him, dragging him out of the water, and they curl up together on the beach not saying a thing to each other. There is nothing to be said. The real tragedy is that he can take the beatings. He can handle anything Ken throws at him physically. It's the mental jabs that dig at him, the ones that hit home particularly hard after he's been forced to go without another meal and his bones are too weary to ever be able to rest. It's those words chanting in his head because those on top of all the actions can only account to one thing: he's not good enough, he doesn't belong and that Jason Brennan is something that needs to be disposed. 4. While Gillian might be the closet thing he has to a support in his life, she really can be a hateful, heartless bitch. For the first couple years of his life, he was the golden child and Gillian was the rebel without a cause. Eventually Brennan catches up and they simmer in the same misery and violence never quite voicing it, but acknowledging it. At times, Brennan can even forgive her for not being able to really look at him because at least she has always tried. After escaping to Hogwarts and allowing a new world to start stitching together some of the shards, she (somewhat begrudgingly) offers him asylum for the summer. It's far from perfect, but at least it's not Kinvara with Ken and there's something to be said about that. Still that silent alliance they had back in the seaside village has dissolved now that Jason has a wand and can do all sorts of tricks with it. He manages to show her one (damn the consequences of underage magic) and he's all smiles and excited because he's not a devil child, but actually someone given a gift to interact with the world in some new way. Gillian doesn't see it like that, and she stops even half looking at him that summer. It gnaws at him because she was his last person in the world, the last thing that kept him tied down and he doesn't know what to do when she doesn't even want him. He tries to ignore it, tries to push it all away, to give her time - something he has never granted anyone before because Jason needs her (even if Brennan would say otherwise). Then Janet happens and one of his books for Care of Magical Creatures gets a little excited and things quickly degrade from there. Now, he has two angry lesbians yelling things at him that no thirteen year old boy should have to endure. (Janet even proposes to take some blood samples and study him because she's a doctor you know and that sort of mutation might be useful in saving the world or some bullshit. Against his better attempts she even gets one and a bit more.) Brennan endures it only long enough to throw his stuff into a bag, slip a few enchanted sweets into the sweet bowl and get out of there, because he can't be around her when she reminds him so much of his bitch of a mother. It would be years later when he's on the edge of fame that his sister sends him a letter (or a really a letter she wrote to his mother is included in another one of Lena's ominous letters to him). She writes that every time she looked at Jason all she saw was her dad promising that impressionable little girl who knew only love and happiness he would be back before she knew it, smiles in his eyes and love radiating off him and encompassing her entirely. The problem was he never came back. And for a moment Jason tries to be empathetic, to understand that reality, but it's too much so he chucks both letters into the fire. At least that will keep him warm for a while. And the fifth and most important thing conclusion he's ever come to is that family, especially ones riffled with differences and abnormalities, is a death sentence. So, of course the moment he can, he runs and decides to never look back. It's easier that way, he tells himself, although that resolve shatters some when over the years he finds himself watching at his peers being greeted by their families at platform 9 3/4. Or when he's caught starring as Tom's mother hugs and kisses her son and then moves to do the same to Brennan (or maybe he's Jason in that moment). And of course he sighs into it, his mind thinking this is what it should have been. But it wasn't, because he was born Jason Brennan to a mother who turned her all encompassing depression over losing the love of her life into disgust for the son she had always wanted, but simply couldn't raise without Greg. He doesn't talk about those things because Jason (and he can be Jason again, now that he has a broom and a sort of family of his own with the Magpies) is sure that if he did these people who don't know the depth of his roots in Kinvara would only look at him the way people have his whole life. And he can't handle that. |