When I Return || Perrentes

Chapter 14: Mirrors

Mike was abnormally quiet as they made their way out of Wyoming. Tony had noticed, having had poor sleep himself, that he hadn't slept peacefully last night, and had tossed and turned. Although Tony was feeling terrible, and he had looked in the mirror that morning and thought he didn't look like himself, and he felt like his hands were someone else's hands, he decided they needed to talk. He hated nothing more than seeing Mike in pain.

"Are you okay?" He asked as they drove along a tree lined road. The surroundings were flat, and Tony ached for the presence of hilly terrain and fiddled with his seatbelt.

"Yeah," Mike shrugged, quiet, and Tony tilted his head, observing him. His shining eyes looked tired and worn, and Tony continued.

"You look kind of tired, is all."

"Slept like a whirling dervish," he laughed bitterly, shaking his head, tiny smile briefly breaking out before it disappeared. "Couldn't stop thinking."

"About what?" Tony pressed quietly, trying not to be too invasive but not wanting to let it slide. He glanced in the wing mirror, saw both Vic and Jaime with their eyes on the back of Mike's seat, listening intently, concerned as Mike hesitated.

"A lot of things, at first. And then I was kind of...thinking about Jack, I guess."

Clincher. Tony clasped his hands and looked down at them in his lap, and then stopped when he thought they didn't look like his hands and he looked out of the window instead, and when he thought it didn't look like his own reality and it was brighter than usual he simply looked away and at the centre console of the car, at the CD slot and the buttons and radio. "Yeah?"

"Little things," Mike shrugged. "Just...lots of little things. About...fairness. And other things like that. I was thinking about some of the strongest things I remember, and...lessons I learnt, time we spent...Christ," he suddenly laughed. "Did I finish any of those sentences?"

"In a way," Tony half laughed, trying not to offer an opinion yet, trying to encourage him to talk on his own. It worked - after a silence, he inhaled deeply, readjusted his hands on the wheel.

"You know..." he started, frowning, brow furrowed, "I haven't told you this but after we got you to Veil Hill, we went back to Baltimore. We weren't going to, the plan was to head straight home, but...I couldn't get my head straight. We dropped you off, then we stayed in Vermont overnight and then we drove back down to Maryland. I needed some time to be quiet. They said we could stay as long as we wanted so we could rest and recover from it all, and...I slept in the room that you'd slept in, because the sheets still smelled like you and I stayed there until it didn't smell like you anymore...Jack came to me after a few days. For the most part they'd both left me to it, to...I don't know. Grieve, I guess. But Jack came to me eventually, and we sat on the bed and I leant on his shoulder, and he didn't say anything. We were just completely silent until I finally started crying, and he stayed till I couldn't cry anymore."

He hesitated, as if telling himself to stop, but then continued nonetheless. "So I was in that room...and I looked out the back window, and saw these two," he motioned briefly  to the backseat, "sitting on the decking together. And suddenly...I just got so insanely jealous. Because it wasn't fair that I had to lose the only person I'd ever loved, why wasn't I allowed to keep you? And I told Jack that." He laughed suddenly, lost in thought. "You know what he did? He took the pillows and the cushions off the bed and divided them between us, so he had half, I had half. So I was there like...'what are you doing?' And he ever so gently took a pillow from his pile, and looked at me with those lovely gentle eyes, and...started hitting me with the pillow."

"What?!" Vic exclaimed as they suddenly started laughing, and even in Tony's disconnected chest he felt a rumble of joy at the mental image of Jack Barakat suddenly beating Mike with a pillow. "Why?!"