Talker's Redemption Read Free Page B

didn’t….” Oh Christ. Not that again. He’d cleared up that little problem when he was twelve, when he yelled, “I am a fucking faggot and get the h-h-h-hell a-ww-waayyy from me!” at his father, when the fucker had come to visit him (beat him) while he was living in foster care.
     
    But Tate had to get this out on his own; Brian wasn’t here to read his mind for him, to stroke his hand, to make him believe he was safe. It was just like being twelve again. It was him and the faltering infrastructure that cared for him. Of course, it only cared for him when it suited the purposes of the alien, adult intelligences in the surrounding stratosphere.
     
    “Oh God,” he whispered, half to himself and half to Brian, unconscious in the ambulance that was two blocks down the road. “Brian, what did you do?”
     
    Jed’s voice next to him was a little bit angry. “His hands were tore up for weeks, Talker. How could you not see it?”
     
    “Same way I lived with him for almost a year and didn’t see that he was in love with me!” Tate snarled back, so bitterly angry with himself he was surprised he didn’t just crawl out of his own damaged, macabre skin and run down the streets as a bloody skeleton, shrieking in pain. “I… I just didn’t see him.”
     
    Not all of him, anyway. Not the part that loved him. Not the part that would, apparently, become violent to protect him.
     
    “How….” Tate had to start again, and it had nothing to do with the stammering that he’d overcome as a kid. “How bad was it?”
     
    Jed grunted, and put the car in drive. Apparently Tate wasn’t going to hyperventilate and pass out, and they both wanted to get to Kaiser when the ambulance did. “It was a fair fight,” he said. “Brian gave him a chance to defend himself. But… man, Brian’s strong. And he was pissed. And you were scaring the hell out of everyone. I had to pull him off, and Trev needed a trip to the hospital.” Jed blew out a breath—a shaky one. Talker realized that Jed cared about Brian, a lot. Not like a lover, but like a little brother, maybe. Like Jed had been caring for Tate, since he’d started working at Gatsby’s Nick.
     
    “But it wasn’t this bad… not nearly this bad. Brian used his fists, and there was only one of him. Trev… he was out the next morning….”
     
    Talker whimpered. Brian would not be out the next morning.
     
    “Would the police really arrest him?” he asked after a moment. Jed negotiated a right hand turn onto Alta Arden before he answered.
     
    “They would if they thought Brian’s attack was unprovoked.”
     
    Tate didn’t have anything to say to that, so for once, he stayed silent.
     
    The hospital was a nightmare, but a familiar one. Tate had spent over a year in the hospital after the fire that had scarred the right side of his body, and even though he’d been a kid then, he still understood doctors and nurses and the rhythms they danced to. In fact, it had been a nurse in the burn ward, a kind one, who had first brought him music to listen to while he was healing. She’d been young, and she’d brought him Green Day, The Cult, and Pearl Jam, as well as old stuff (for her) like The Ramones and The Clash. He’d clung to that music when the pain had gotten too bad. When other people had simply whimpered or cried when they’d ripped off the burn scabs, Tate had been screaming the lyrics to Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” and bless his nurse, she’d been singing with him. Jeremy spoke in… class today…
     
    Talker found he was humming that song while he sat next to Brian’s bed and heard the doctors talk about ultrasounds and internal damage and whether Brian had it or not. He knew what internal damage was too. He’d been beaten by a foster father once, and had spent a few nights being measured for the big medical boogie man of internal damage. It had been a “no” on the surgery (and a new foster home, one a little more “gay-friendly”) but he