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the-original-b · 4 years

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Archangel: Brimstone

Format: Prose / Fiction, one-shot

Word Count: c. 4,200

Summary: Authorities begin to investigate the shootout at the Nyne Circles club, and discover last night’s violence wasn’t the first time the establishment bore witness to mass bloodshed.

Warning(s): blood, violence, implied sex crimes

Nyne Circles club, Monday morning.

A man in a dark suit and white shirt stepped off the lift as the gate opened; his tie loose around his open shirt collar. He strode down the short hallway, stepping over a covered body on his way to a note written in chalk on the wall that separated the entrance from the main atrium. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter,” he read in a gravelly, masculine baritone. He slid his hands into his pockets and snickered to himself as he noted the signs pointing toward the Gomorrah and Sodom levels. “A little on-the-nose with that one,” he noted as he headed down to his right toward Sodom.

He was met by two uniformed police officers watching over the room. “This is a crime scene, sir,” the younger of the two said. “I’m gonna have to see some identification before you come any closer.”

“Sorry, gentlemen,” the newcomer in the dark suit added with a wry smile. “Where are my manners..? I’m Agent Peter Cross,” he said. “United States Government.”

“Is that right, Agent?” The officer put his hands on his hips, challenging the man. “And who are you with exactly? FBI? CIA? Homeland Security?”

“I’m OGA,” Cross replied after a two-second pause. His salt and pepper hair was slicked back, and his jaw sported a manicured pale gray two-week beard accented with black hairs. “And your crime scene here is the latest in a series of interconnected incidents, so I’ll be taking over your investigation of it.”

OGA, as in Other Government Agency. “Yeah? How’s that?”

“Earlier this month, local law enforcement pulls a headless body out of the driver seat of a pickup across the street from Saint Vittorio’s. Fast forward a few weeks, and a poor lady out for her morning jog on the Margaret Pace Park Bywalk stumbles over what’s left of two bodies. And then just yesterday NYPD collects half a dozen more in a Bayside alleyway.” He shifted his weight. “Including this, we’re looking at four acts of extreme gangland violence in three different states. That made this a federal matter even before fire and sulfur destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah here.”

“This is all good and lovely, but I still have no idea if you’re real, Mr. Cross. Do you have ID?”

“What I have, Officer Lindbeck, is a cell phone. I so much as utter a vowel to the right people, and that possession charge that was expunged from little Davey’s record quickly and decisively becomes un-expunged. So if you’re done showing your partner how big your dick is, please let me in so I can do my job.” His lips curled upward into a sly smirk.

“You leave my son out of this, creep,” Officer Lindbeck snarled. “Or I’ll make you regret ever showing your face here.”

Cross retracted his head, raising both his eyebrows and widening his hazel-brown eyes. “Well pardon the shit out of my goddamn French, young man,” he said, “but did you just threaten me?”

Officer Lindbeck’s older and more seasoned partner got between the two men. He had some familiarity with OGA-types and knew exactly what kind of people they were. “Let it go, David,” he suggested. “Go take a walk. Get some air, maybe a coffee.”

Lindbeck eyed his partner, then Cross. He shook his head and cursed under his breath as he walked away from them, toward the lift.

The other officer turned back to Cross. “Forgive David,” he finally said. “He hasn’t been with the Force long enough to know ‘OGA’ is shorthand for stop asking questions… how can I help you, Agent Cross?”

Cross looked over the room briefly. “You can bring me up to speed on what the actual hell happened in here.”

“We’re working on that,” he said, leading him deeper into the area with a head tilt. “All we know for sure is the carnage we see wasn’t planned. If it were,” he noted, “we’d be looking at a lot more DBs than what we got.”

“That counting the one in the lobby?”

“No, there were no gunshot wounds on that one. She was probably just trampled—like the others on this floor. Gunshots are all upstairs.”

Cross turned his gaze up to the mezzanine floor. “What’s your name, Officer?”

“Blake,” he said.

“Well, Officer Blake,” he suggested, a grin tugging at his lip, “why don’t we take a look up there and see what we find?”

Blake followed Cross back toward the lobby and up to the catwalk across from the mezzanine. He stayed behind looking over one of the bodies as Cross proceeded toward the back office, stepping over another corpse to examine the damage done to the wall adjacent to the doorway.

“Blake,” he called, curling his first and second fingers twice and beckoning the other officer. “Come check this out.”

Blake arrived shortly afterward, standing to Cross’s right and bending over to look at what Cross was focused on. “Bullet holes,” he noted. “They came from down the hall and hit the wall at an angle.”

“That they very well did,” Cross agreed. “But they’re different.”

Blake squinted a little to see what it was he was talking about. “Yeah, I see what you mean… calibers aren’t the same.”

“Right you are again. This here looks like a nine millimeter. The other…” Cross shut one eye and inspected the damage. “Forty-five or bigger, if my eyes serve me.”

“So, two different guns?”

“At two different times. Check out the wear in the drywall where the bullets hit,” he noted. “Nine is fresh from last night,” he observed, “Big Boy’s been around for a while.”

Blake looked back at the notches in the wall. “So you’re telling me last night wasn’t the first shootout in this place?”

“That, my friend, is exactly what I’m saying…” Cross stepped away from the wall, peered into the Red Room at the covered bodies on the floor and kept going to find a spot on the catwalk to lean over the handrail. “Do you know what this place used to be?”

“I’ve read reports,” Blake said, standing a few feet from him. “It was some kind of luxury club for criminals.”

Cross nodded. “It was called Brimstone, and it was the crown jewel of the Teller crime syndicate five or six years ago. We all knew it, but no concrete evidence was ever dug up connecting it to Mr. Teller. Everything we had was circumstantial but even I knew it was enough to nail him for this place. Higher-ups didn’t agree, though. They withheld the raid order.” He laced his fingers together as he continued. “Then one night an ex-Special Forces operator-turned-fixer gets a tip from somebody in the loop about a human trafficking operation run out of the place, and he shut that shit down… Couldn’t get Teller himself, so he settled for the wife instead.”

“How do you know all that?” Blake asked, a few feet from the other man.

Cross shot him a look and smirked before looking back across the floor at the mezzanine. “I’ve read reports,” he said. “Keep an eye on this venue, Officer Blake” he advised, straightening back up. “If I were a bettin’ boy, I’d say this place’ll be up and running again in no time at all.”

The Brimstone Lounge (currently known as Cloud Nyne), five or six years ago.

Three men approached the door that one night, and a broad-shouldered fellow in a dark suit and shirt with an open collar knocked on the front door three times, then two more in quick succession. A mail slot slid open for the doorman to look through and accept three invitations from the men outside, and after a few seconds the door swung open to let them in. They checked their coats as they walked in, then made their way toward the main floor, a spot-lit open space with a bar on one end and a stage on the other. Pole dancers on stage moved evocatively to club beats for the entertainment of the patrons there, who watched from a number round tables with their drinks and other mind-altering substances.

The trio stopped to acknowledge the stage performers, but kept moving toward a wide staircase that spiraled upward at concentric 90-degree angles which led to the VIP area upstairs. When they got there, they presented their invitations to the bouncers there—dressed in black suits and shirts with cerulean blue ties—and opened their jackets to show them they were carrying handguns. Such was the understanding; handguns were allowed as long as they were concealed and nobody caused trouble. Since all the staff and most of the patrons were carrying anyway, trouble was seldom started.

After passing a quick search, the trio made their way upstairs and found their seats in the quieter lounge area. At the wall opposite the staircase was a well-appointed bar at which a handful of people enjoyed their drinks, and at the other side of the room was a seating area and smaller stage where a procession of young, specimen men and women dressed in very little would be presented to and bid upon by the seated observers. Behind the bar and around the room were a handful more men in black suits and blue ties.

The auctioneer—a middle-aged woman in a classy off-the-shoulder cerulean blue gown—gave exposition for the merchandise on display and accepted bids before breaking for twenty minutes. She reclaimed her place at the podium. “The intermission has concluded, ladies and gentlemen,” she said into a microphone. “Please find your seats again and we’ll continue with this evening’s auction.”

One of the patrons, an athletically built fair-skinned fellow around the age of forty reclaimed his seat with a gin martini is his hand. His fingers moved absentmindedly around the stainless steel garnish pick as he placed occasional bids, not exactly looking to win but more to maintain the illusion of interest. His tailored black suit, crisp white shirt, rosewood red tie and matching pocket square garnered enough attention; if the staff got the slightest hint he wasn’t there for the same reason as the other patrons, the evening would take a turn too far ahead of schedule.

~~~~

The emcee brought the auction to a close an hour later. “This concludes the evening’s fundraiser, ladies and gentlemen! Congratulations again to our winners; you may claim your prizes at the back entrance. Please enjoy the rest of your evening.”

As the patrons began clearing out, the man in the red tie stood up and made his way to the bathroom, concealing his garnish pick in his closed hand as he moved and holding it between his teeth as he washed his hands. He ran them through his combed-back light brown hair and stroked his graying stubble in the mirror while he waited for all but one of the other men in the room with him to leave. The other one—a staff member identifiable by the cerulean blue tie thrown over his shoulder—was urinating in one of the stalls.

The man in the red tie made his way to the door, undoing his jacket and engaging the bolt-and-barrel lock in the ceiling before turning back to the staff member. He retrieved the pick from between his teeth and reached around to stab the other man in the neck with it, then punched him in the ribs and swept his feet backward to have him fall face first into the toilet, where he held the man’s head in place under the water until he stopped moving.

Then he washed the blood and toilet water from his hands and got to work. He found the air vent mentioned in his briefing and unscrewed three of the cover’s fasteners with his fingertips, letting it hang from the fourth, then reached up to retrieve the box his contact had smuggled there the day earlier. On it was a post-it note that read,

Krueger,

Here’s a little extra firepower, as promised.

Krueger lifted the lid off the case and examined its contents—a loaded SPAS-12 and bandolier with eighteen extra shells, along with earplugs, two spare .45 ACP magazines for his Mk. 23, and a single M84 stun grenade.

“Ausgezeichnet,” he said to himself.

He fastened the ammunition belt to himself under his jacket and unfolded the shotgun’s stock, pressing it against his shoulder and raising it to his eyes to look down the sights and acquire the picture. Then he placed his earplugs in, disengaged the safety, switched the action from pump-operation to semi-auto, and went back towards the door, resting his hand on the bolt lock for a moment. He closed his eyes, exhaled, and released the lock when he opened his eyes again. He swung the door wide and raised the shotgun, acquiring his first target behind the bar.

Krueger dropped the bartender with a single well-aimed blast from his shotgun, and adjusted his angle to find his second target by the stairs who he dispatched just as quickly as the first. Peripherally to his right he spotted a third staff member reach into his jacket, and before he could shoot Krueger half-spun and dropped to one knee to line his shot and fired twice. He rose back up to his feet just as he sighted a fourth staff member and squeezed the trigger a fifth time.

He quickly scanned the room and found no more threats, then made his way to the stars as the music below stopped and the patrons began to evacuate. He descended half of them then vaulted over the banister to land in the lobby, where he targeted the doorman next; he fired before his target could draw his gun.

Krueger got back to his feet and slipped behind a wide load-bearing column, peering over it at the staff members he could see shepherding the patrons out the emergency exit at the back of the space. He took this moment to catch his breath; he turned the shotgun upside down, took four rounds from his ammo belt and slid them into the magazine tube one at a time, then put two more into his gun to top it off.

The room was considerably emptier now, and Krueger could more easily spot the bright blue ties of his targets as he peered around the column again. He knew he had to move soon—the body armor he wore under his shirt would stop anything smaller than a .44 magnum, but it only covered his chest and back. His best bet was to stay mobile and not give them a chance to shoot him.

He stayed low behind the half-wall partition separating the lobby from the main atrium, moving away from the bar area along which he knew the staff would begin their patrol. He knew engaging them in the open would mean his peril, so he readied the stun grenade and took a moment to prepare himself for what it would do to him in an enclosed space.

Krueger laid his shotgun on the floor, then pulled the pin on the bomb and tossed it backward over the half-wall in the direction of the bar. He curled up, turning toward the floor shutting his eyes while he cupped his hands over his plugged ears.

By the time the others realized what was about to happen, it was too late.

“Oh, shit—!”

The deafening boom filled the space, reverberating from the walls and disorienting everyone within direct exposure. Krueger slowly opened his eyes after dealing with the shockwave, and took a second to find his balance again before reaching for his shotgun. Unlike him, his targets were neither trained nor prepared for the concussive device, which put him at a distinct advantage over them.

Krueger stood back up and raised his weapon, dropping each of his dizzied, staggering targets with blasts from his shotgun as he moved out from behind the partition and headed towards the stage. He cleared the weapon, firing nine times before reaching the stage, and drew his Mk. 23 one-handed from inside his jacket as he approached the space behind it.

He held the .45 out in front of him in his right hand while he held onto the shotgun with his left. He peered into the open doors of each room, clearing them quickly until he came across a closed door. He kicked it open and held the handgun out, scaring five dancers hiding there.

Krueger lowered the weapon, knowing they were no threat to him. “Get out,” he ordered.

The dancers wasted no time; they darted past him toward the exit.

As he turned he was ambushed by one staff member in the uniform black suit and blue tie; Krueger slapped the gun in his hand with the shotgun muzzle and shot him twice in the throat with his .45, then once more in the head once he hit the ground. He turned back around to clear the final room before holstering his handgun to reload the shotgun and return to the main atrium.

Krueger raised the shotgun again from behind the backstage corner, looking through the sights at the handful of people left alive in the space with him as they gathered their senses in the wake of the stun bomb. He scanned their outfits for the cerulean blue ties he’d been shooting at all night, and when he found none he stepped out from behind cover and moved toward the emergency exit.

Peripherally he spotted one rise from behind the bar; he and Krueger got their shots off at the same time, but Krueger’s vest saved him while the other man had no such protection. He shot the dying barman again as got back to his feet, cursing as he proceeded onward to the emergency exit.

He stepped through an employees-only door to his left and proceeded down a hallway. In the dim light he spotted the sheen of the auctioneer’s cerulean blue gown. She turned to lock eyes with him; in her left hand was a compact handgun.

Krueger held the shotgun steady, training the sights on the center of her chest. He’d been shooting at that color all night—the staff color—but her gun was lowered. She had a chance to walk away, so he offered it to her.

“Put it down,” he ordered, his finger resting on the trigger.

Her eyes narrowed, and she raised the gun.

Krueger fired before she could take her shot, and lowered the shotgun as life escaped the auctioneer with a sigh, her eyes still open.

He took a step over to her and, recognizing who she was, knelt down beside her. This was Maria Teller—the wife of local mob boss Christopher Teller, the man whose establishment this was and the one he was sent in to kill. He reached over to close her eyelids, then thumbed the blood trickle from the corner of her mouth before continuing down the hallway and reaching a lift to get to the basement level.

He elbowed the switch to activate the lift and placed the last three shells on his bandolier into his shotgun as the lift descended. After them he still had the spare magazines for his handgun—whatever was waiting for him in the basement, he was confident he had enough ammunition to kill it.

~~~~

The lift gates opened, and Krueger raised his shotgun again as he walked forward scanning the dark, dank cellar. Shafts of light permeated downward from stage lighting assemblies hanging from the ceiling, illuminating passing dust. In the quiet he could identify footsteps in the space before him; carefully he approached the far wall. To his left was a set of stairs leading up to a mezzanine floor, and to his right was a walkway that emptied into the open atrium where a dozens of massive plywood boxes were arranged.

Clearing that maze, he knew, would be a nightmare. He moved to his left and quietly ascended the stairs; the moment he crossed a pair of hands took the shotgun by its pump and pulled it away. Krueger managed to get a shot off but hit the wall instead of his target. Immediately he threw his right fist at the man’s jaw, and grabbed hold of his lapel to throw him into and over the banister. He drew his Mk. 23 and peered into the atrium below, firing twice at the fallen man.

Gunfire from two more down in the storage-box maze erupted upward, and Krueger threw himself back into the wall to catch his bearings. He traced the wall back toward the stairwell, holding the handgun close in his left hand for when they inevitably came up to engage him.

He fired twice at the first man to cross the threshold, and kicked him back down the stairs into the other. He fired a third, fourth, and fifth time at the two men to finish them.

Krueger’s vest caught a round meant for his left shoulder blade, spinning him around to face the catwalk opposite the mezzanine. Immediately he raised his handgun and emptied the magazine in the direction the shots came from. One of his shots struck the last staff member in the hip—he lurched backward, retreating deeper down the catwalk and tucking himself behind a doorway.

Krueger swapped the spent magazine for a fresh one from his bandolier, and slowly, methodically approached the catwalk with the gun raised. He spotted the other man as he popped out of cover to fire, but Krueger shot twice, hitting both the other man and the wall near the doorway. The staff member fell backward through the door.

Krueger closed in on the fallen man, kicking his handgun out of reach and keeping his weapon trained on the man lying on the floor.

He mustered the strength to tilt his head and look Krueger in the eye. “T-Teller,” he croaked. Blood came out of his mouth along with the name. “Where’s Missus—”

Krueger shot the man in the head before he could finish his thought. He relaxed his stance and exhaled.

“Better now,” he put forth, holstering his gun again. “Better.”

He moved back down the catwalk to reclaim his shotgun, and started limping as the adrenaline began filtering out of his blood. He bent over to pick the gun up when he heard movement coming from one of the plywood crates below.

He snapped the shotgun back to his eyes and descended the stairs one more time, stepping over the bodies. When he arrived at the crate making the most noise, he fired at two of the hinges at the corners of the crate’s façade , then ripped the front of it off to look inside.

His expression softened as he lowered the shotgun and looked upon a naked woman holding her knees to her chest, her makeup tracing dark lines down her cheeks. She shot a horrified look back up at him, not daring to breathe.

He knelt down before her and placed the shotgun on the floor of the crate, then took his jacket off to gently place around her shoulders. Looking at her again, he recognized her as one of the people Maria Teller was auctioning off just over an hour ago.

“Are the others here as well?” he asked her. His tone was warm, fatherly, even.

Quietly the woman nodded.

Krueger stood up and looked around him at all the plywood crates in the room with him. Who knew how many other people were trapped in crates with them, or for how long they were there? Who could say for sure how many young men and women the Tellers and their associates kidnapped off the streets and sold for the people who bought them to do God-only-knows-what to them? How many more did he save from this; how many didn’t he?

He looked back down at the scared, naked woman. “I was never here,” he told her. Then he turned to head back to the lift.

~~~~

Krueger made his way back up to the top floor restroom to reclaim the case his weapons were stored in after freeing the other young men and women auctioned off earlier that evening. After placing the SPAS-12, Mk. 23, and bandolier back into the box and shutting the lid, he made his way to the ground floor again and stepped behind the bar to make a phone call on the landline there. He hit 9 to reach an outside line and dialed 9-1-1.

“Send police and EMS to the Morrow building on Park Avenue,” he said as soon as the operator picked up the phone. “There are at least two dozen men and women in the basement level who’ll need warm clothes, hot food, and cool water. Find out who they are, whether they have family, and send them home.” He hung the phone up and went back to the front to collect his coat, then headed to the back of the room to leave through the emergency exit and disappear into the night.

(Masterlist)

#fiction #original work #original content #original fiction #prose #creative writing #drama #thriller #action #crime story

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amorremanet · 7 years

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Something about Oz, my OC: abusive father, "we gotta keep the appearances up" mother. After his dad's death he can't bring himself to spend too much time with his mom, he hasn't forgiven her for letting the abuse keep going.

send me a fact about your ocs, i reply with a fact about mine!

Oh man, he’s the opposite of my Pete, in that regard. In the aftermath of his abusive father dying, Pete’s gotten closer to his Mama (and he was already pretty close to her), and turned most of his blame toward Jimmy, his big brother.

Some of it’s in the realm of, “it might not be fair, but it’s understandable,” like being mad at Jimmy because he was the one who got more praise when their Dad, James, pit the kids against each other for myriad reasons (like, it’s not Jimmy’s fault that their Dad did that to them and he didn’t “get it easier,” but it’s still understandable that Pete feels resentment over it, and it’s easier to direct that at Jimmy than at their Dad, not least since Jimmy’s still alive and can actually react to it. Also, it’s really not Jimmy’s fault that he takes more after James than Leilani, physically, but it’s kinda understandable that Pete doesn’t always handle it well when he looks at his brother and sees a reflection of their Dad).

Some of it’s in the realm of, “Pete is mad at Jimmy for something else, and dragging it into the mess of feelings about their experiences with their late father, because it gives him justification for being mad at Jimmy” (like how he’s perpetually peeved at Jimmy for his tacit homophobia, which he just keeps spewing, no matter how many times he gets called out on it, or like how he can’t, “voice concern” for Pete without it sounding a lot like, “Are you sure you’re gay? Because I think that this might all go away if you just weren’t gay anymore” — and it’s fair for Pete to be mad at Jimmy over it, but it’s not really related to their issues that were more directly caused by their Dad).

And some of it’s in the realm of, “Okay, Pete is reaching by a lot and he’s projecting his internalized victim-blaming and internalized abuser logic onto Jimmy because he’s an emotional wreck at the moment and he has no idea what else to do with it. On some level, he realizes this, but he’s also most likely a few minutes off from having an emotional meltdown” (like, if he ever slips into anything that sounds like, “It was Jimmy’s fault that Dad did [x thing] to me and Cora”? He’s a mess, he’s probably alone with Sebastian +/- Seb’s dogs, and there’s a really good chance that Pete is going to be crying into his best friend’s chest in the next five minutes)

Granted, there’s a pretty big difference in the situations, because of the differences between Pete’s Mama and what Oz’s Mom sounds like. Pete’s Mama, Leilani, was less about keeping up appearances (and when she did care about that, it was less of a, “but what would the neighbors think” thing and more about trying to put up a strong front to her kids and her side of the family), and she was pretty limited in her ability to actually get out of the situation (if not for the kids, she might have had the resources to leave, but she also wouldn’t have forgiven herself if she’d pulled a “Doll’s House” and walked out like Ibsen’s Nora, leaving her kids with James).

Then, there’s the issue of how messy the situation was, because James’s primary methods of abuse weren’t physical (and when they did cross into the physical realm, it usually wasn’t like breaking big brother Jimmy’s arm or slapping Leilani and middle sister Cora around, but in ways that put fear into his wife and children, and that he could use to manipulate them). One of his most frequently used tactics was gaslighting about his emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually abusive behaviors, and there were plenty of things he did that Pete didn’t get weren’t part of How Every Family Is until he’d seen enough of Seb’s parents to decide that they weren’t just acting kind and supportive when their kids had friends over; they were actually like that.

Three other big factors came together to make it all worse, in Pete’s mind:

1. the moments with James that weren’t completely horrible, most of which he didn’t really turn into, “the abuser is now going to do a nice thing by way of fauxpologizing, gaslighting, victim blaming, and so on” because he didn’t mean for most of them to happen. He usually didn’t have fauxpology moments, because he very rarely recognized that he was in the wrong and needed to apologize or at least put on a façade of apologizing, so when he had okay moments, Pete trusts that they were mostly genuine, and they muddy the emotional water for Pete by a lot, because he’s pretty sure his life would be easier if he could just unilaterally hate his Dad.

Some of these moments were little things, like being proud of a project that Cora put together for science class, or being down on Pete’s fondness for the theatre and criticizing his desire to be an actor, but showing up to his opening night as Cinderella’s Prince Charming Into the Woods and being the first person to make it into a standing ovation (probably without realizing that Pete could see him).

Some of them, Pete doesn’t even really remember consciously, most of the time, until something trips a wire in his head and reminds him of one time when James, who didn’t know at the time that his youngest is gay, told his kids not to listen to their Grandparents when they went on about how LGBTQ people are all terrible, evil sinners and going to Hell, because their uncle, his little brother, is gay. Their cousins’ Dad is gay, too, and so are their Mother and her wife, so unless they think that Uncles Nicholas and Jacob, and Aunts Rachael and Melissa, are all going to Hell, then they should just know that their Grandmother and Grandfather are full of shit about gay people.

Some of them were bigger things, like getting into it with some of his kids’ teachers because he felt they were being treated unfairly (like when one of Jimmy’s essays for a history class in high school got marked down because he used sources other than the textbook and Sister Mary Margaret’s course pack, or when Pete got in trouble because his English teacher didn’t believe that a fourteen-year-old could’ve read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart over summer break, much less understood it enough to write an essay about it), or getting into it with his parents for picking at Leilani being Filipina and the kids for being biracial.

Some of them were sort of in the middle things that didn’t mean a lot at the time, but have since developed more and/or deeper significance, like one time when James was sober (which was pretty odd for him, at that point), and was a dick about conveying the sentiment, “You’re my son and I love you, I accept that you’re gay but really hate your current boyfriend because he doesn’t treat you right, and FYI, maybe you’ve got your Mama and your sister convinced that you’re doing fine, but if you have to get fucked up on tequila and stimulants just to get through bringing him to dinner with the family and having a not-that-subtle quickie in the men’s room — one that you didn’t seem particularly enthused about even with your current level of intoxication — then that’s a problem, Peter-Paolo,” but was still genuinely trying to help

But whatever form they took, the long-term end result was always massive emotional conflict, because these moments made him feel pretty sure that James did love his family, that it wasn’t all an exercise in him satiating his own ego and sense of entitlement by trying to control Leilani and their kids, and that it wasn’t all terrible — which is all a mess to deal with, because it keeps Pete from unilaterally hating James, and it’s so hard to fully parse out which parts affected him in which ways, making it harder to address all of them.

Then there’s how these moments helped further normalize all of James’s other behaviors, and just…… “Emotionally messy” is an understatement;

2. the fact that James was, himself, a victim/survivor — maybe not a textbook example of a victim/survivor who went on to be an abuser in his own right, but he was pretty close to it. James never even got to understand that what his parents had put him through was abusive, before he died, because they rarely crossed into physical abuse (they were wealthy white Catholics on the Upper East Side in NYC, who eventually moved to Baltimore instead; any physical abuse of their kids would’ve required explanations to the neighbors) and he always thought the way that Virginia and Francis were with their kids was “just good parenting.”Not that any of this is an excuse for how James treated his children (I mean, his younger brother Nicholas went through the same shit and he didn’t abuse his kids) but it’s a point where Pete empathizes with his Dad, despite everything that James ever did to him, Leilani, Cora, and even Jimmy. Like, on some levels, James believed that he was justified in his abuse because it was, “done out of love,” and he was, “helping prepare his kids for the world” whenever he abused them, and, “doing the right thing for his kids, even if it’s kinda hard for them to hear right now”…… and a lot of that came out of how he was treated by his parents while growing up, and as an adult, and how he dealt with that—and Pete doesn’t want to feel for his Dad, or understand that he was, on some level, trying to do what he felt was the right thing and that his way of handling everything was, in large part, learned from his parents and how they treated him;

and 3. the Grandma Virginia factor, because Grandpa Francis wasn’t involved in Pete’s life that deeply (he more often went after Jimmy and Hank, Nicholas’s oldest son, though Pete doesn’t really know about any of that) — but oh man, Grandma Virginia mostly went after Pete and Emerson, Nicholas’s middle child.She was bad enough in her own right, for several reasons, and worse because having been one of her “favorite” grandkids makes Pete empathize with James that much more when he’d really rather not, and she just compounds everything in ways that Pete hasn’t even halfway parsed out since she died a few years back, because they’re tangled and messy, and for all he has literally danced on her grave before (it quickly devolved into having an emotional meltdown on her grave, but still), he did love her.Sometimes, he’s pretty sure he hates her for making him love her more than he hates her for all of the shit she put him and Emerson through (and if pressed to explain it, he’d guess that he hates what she did to them, and he’d hate her for that if Virginia hadn’t made both of them love her, but making them love her was even worse than that because of how it clouded their ability to see that what she was doing to them was wrong and limited their ability to fight back).Sometimes, he feels like he hates her most for what she did to James, and that usually leaves Pete feeling really confused, since he can’t tell if it’s coming more out of, “If she hadn’t abused my Dad, maybe he wouldn’t have abused us” or wishing that James hadn’t been abused because of what a mess it made of him and wishing that James hadn’t been such a mess because, despite anything that Pete ever says to the contrary, he loved his Dad and still does, and he wishes that he didn’t because he feels like hating James would make all of this easier, but…Sometimes, he feels like he hates her more for the things that didn’t seem like a lot at the time, but became bigger deals down the line — like how she tried to pit Pete against Leilani’s side of the family and pull him away from her as much as Virginia could get away with, given that Pete has always been a Mama’s Boyor like how she tried to say that Emerson didn’t need treatment or professional help for his abuse of prescription stimulants when it had nearly killed him more than once, which she said was because she, “believed that he could take care of it himself,” but really, it was because she knew that his parents and siblings wanted to push him into an LGBTQ-exclusive inpatient rehab and get him away from the pro-reparative therapy psychiatrist he was seeing, and she hadn’t succeeded in making Nicholas, “turn away from sin and homosexual deviancy,” but she shad hope that she could get Emerson and Pete to do so

And…… I lost track of that by a lot, but. Yeah, uh.

So, as seen here, the Ardens are kind of a huge mess in a lot of ways, with regard to abuse and familial dysfunction, but Pete’s trying to do his best with the aftermath of it. He’s kinda wound up treating Emerson as a mix of, “replacement older brother, because he’s younger than Jimmy but still older than Pete, and Pete and Jimmy have both contributed to the often shambolic state of their relationship, and it’s easier to talk to Emerson than Jimmy” and, “good friend, who’s okay with good-naturedly picking on each other (though Emerson isn’t sure if Pete is doing that when he says he’s pretty sure Emerson made up his current boyfriend, or if Pete really doesn’t believe that Asa exists)”

And, like. Even if things weren’t a complete mess with Jimmy, Pete would, at this point, feel like his Princess (Sebastian) is basically his brother…… but things being a mess with Jimmy made Pete decide that Seb is pretty much his brother sooner than he might’ve done otherwise, because Seb gets on Pete’s level better, he apologizes when he fucks up by Pete rather than turning it into some tu quoque, “Well, Pete, you’ve fucked up by me before, so I’m not obligated to apologize to you” bullshit, he and Pete have followed each other into multiple bad idea misadventures because they couldn’t talk each other out of it and went, “Okay, well, you’re not going alone” while Jimmy has always been more hands-off……

And I’m not sure how to wrap this up, so…… This is an abrupt ending, I’m sorry that this got so out of hand, I just have a lot of feelings about characters who’ve survived shitty abusive situations, and I’m done now

#lactosefreepussy #ocs tag #ask box tag #memes for ts #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #pete arden: dramatic disaster #leilani arabejo #james arden #jimmy arden #cora arden #emerson arden #virginia arden #jimmy & pete #james & pete #emerson & pete #leilani & pete #pete x seb #abuse cw// homophobia cw// racism cw// abuse culture cw// drugs ref// addiction ref//#oc fact sharing meme

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