Title: Payback
By: Read 300300
Pairing: Very mild Nick/Greg (*see author's notes)
Author's notes: Most of this is Nick's recollections of the past, with only brief references to the present, where he is in a relationship with Greg. Unbeta'd, as of yet. If anyone wants to volunteer...
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't have the money to buy.
Rating: PG-13, violence and language.
Summary: Nick has more experience with gaybashing than he'd like to admit, even to himself.

There was a time when I felt loved.

When I felt special.

And then she took that away from me. For years, I felt as though something had to be missing, that there was some connection I was unable to make that others could. I couldn’t have pinned it to what passed between us those nights, but now that I look back on it, I’m sure that’s what it must have been. Before then, I was normal, happy even. But after what she did to me, I was scared and alone. Nobody could help me because I could never tell anyone what was wrong.

The rest of elementary school and most of middle school passed before I started to realize just how different I was, but this time, it wasn’t special. It wasn’t anything but pure torment starting in high school, hiding my hard ons from the other boys in the locker rooms, training myself out of easily becoming sexually aroused around others. To be frank, I did not want to get my ass kicked. It was so difficult to do, and now I’m not even sure how I did it, but I must have. It was like taking a million tumbling things, rolling them together into a ball, then compressing it until everything was tiny enough to handle. Tiny enough to put away. Tiny enough to forget.

Some things, you don’t forget. I mean, I had friends. I was a little bit geeky, even back then. Braces, glasses, the whole nine nerdy yards. I had this one friend, though, named Garry. He and I were close back in middle school. Given enough time, we might have been…well, that’s not important. Every evening, we would get together and play video games at my house after school. Nintendo was just getting big then in the late 80’s, and we played the original Legend of Zelda like there was no tomorrow. Even today, I still game a little bit; Greg and I share a PS2 and Xbox, and, whereas I played Final Fantasy 1 with Garry back then, my lover and I will sit around and watch each other go at FFX-2 with fervor.

After middle school, Garry and I drifted, I guess you could say. We never really had one final argument that ended it all. I got my braces removed and my doctor decided that there was really no need for my glasses, and all my years of playing baseball with my older brothers finally paid off—I made the baseball team my first year of high school. Of course, the coaches loved that fact that I had the perfect build for football too, and, since all members of the Athletics teams participated in every season, I found myself drafted onto the football team. In the beginning, I didn’t mind, really. The exercise kept me in shape, and there was no need for me to worry about not being fit enough come spring.

But as time passed, things changed. Garry and I were no longer friends. He was captain of the computer programming team, which had just been started at our school that year. I no longer really had a best friend, and I found that, as time passed, I loved football more and more for the release it gave me, a release that nothing else could give me at the time.

I don’t actually remember much of high school, which is probably for the best. I remember random incidents and faces in the crowd. I remember the football teams and the sweat and the anger and the pounding. I remember taking out my anger at myself for being so different on those other boys. After all, that’s what we were then—boys, though I guess we fancied ourselves as men.

We wanted the control that came with that position; we wanted to know that we were powerful enough. We took charge every single game, taking our frustrations at the world out on each other. None did more so than I, I think. I had so much bottled up inside me, and I couldn’t even face it. Never really did learn to face it, or even try, until I had to—but that’s not really too important, right now, is it?

So there we were, just these angry little kids in helmets, throwing ourselves into a group against others, trying our damnedest to beat the living shit out of our opponents on that field. That’s all high school was, now that I look back on it. We banded together against what we perceived to be a common foe and then we just went after them. Clawed our way to victory. Whatever it took to win, to survive.

Football is not survival, although when you’re out on that field and your adrenaline is pumping and your heart is racing and you’re head is spinning out of control with rage, it feels like it. Football does not have a point, when you think about it. It means nothing. We create our own little rules and teams, and we fight, abiding by these, but they never matter outside of the game.

I don’t think the other guys understood that. Off the field, others hailed us as the stars of the school. In a state where high school football is very close to an official religion, they called us heroes. Role models. The best of the best.

They likened us to God.

But as I said earlier, I knew I was a freak. I could never go back to a time before her, and I didn’t really know how to exist in a time after her. All the love and support that my parents gave me had never prepared me for her. Allison. Her parents named her Allison. She had a life outside of what happened to me—parents, friends, a job. I didn’t matter to her. I didn’t change her life the way she changed mine.

Football did nothing to help, in the long run. We beat our teammates up on the field, tackle after tackle, and we thought it gave us the right to do it to everyone else too. I guess we were bullies, but I never could quite get up the courage to face that in my mind. I had always known that it wasn’t right for us to do even the little things to people, like throwing them against lockers and all of that other teenage bullshit, but I didn’t care enough then. I rationalized it, made it all disappear after it was over. I had mastered the art long before; nothing that I didn’t want to remember stayed in my head for very long. But I couldn’t do that with geeky little Garry.

He was different too—and not just in the computer nerd way. I think you deserve to know that. We were similar, yet we had our own differences. He never feared what made him different. In fact, he embraced that part of himself, never keeping it a secret.

He scared me, I think, by showing me what I could become. And as nauseating as the sight and smell of his blood on the pavement was, all I could feel as I hit him was my own anger at myself. And her. I hated her in ways that I couldn’t express. She made me this thing I didn’t want to be. I never did, and I never asked for any of it… Do you know what it means to grow up as a faggot in Texas? It means pure hell, day after day.

And there Garry was, so proud of being a freak. Nowadays, it’s almost normal for kids to come out in high school. But back in the 80’s? God, that was asking for trouble. He didn’t care though. He flaunted it, so I hit him, over and over, feeling my knuckles connect with his face, making him feel what I felt.

“You fucking perverted freak!” Words were a howl, ripped from my throat, more intelligible the louder I screamed.

At the time, I didn’t know why it felt so good, taking my rage out on him. The bloody slap of skin against skin punctuated my nearly intelligible epithets. Rage became screaming, the word “faggot” ringing loudly until my throat was hoarse and my hands were covered in blood from his nose and jaw.

Later, I found out that we had broken his nose in two places. No, not we—I had done it. I had, with my own hands, hands and feet thudding against skin.

That night after we ran off—criminals always run—I couldn’t just go back to Aaron’s house with the rest of the boys and knock back a few beers as if nothing had happened. Not with my hands covered in Garry’s blood. Not with my memory of the shock on his face as I threw the first punch. Instead, I staggered the two miles back to my house, numb, the chill night wind and light rain barely fazing me. Two miles was nothing to me. Baseball and track, not to mention the entire football season, had trained me well. I could have run that in twelve minutes and not even been winded.

How I must have appeared that night--in jeans and an old t-shirt, walking around with no real sense of purpose through the sheeting rain--I’ll never know for sure. Wild look in my eye, the panic of a caged cat. Tensed hands and a grimace remotely reminiscent of pain.

With more than a little trepidation, I finally made my way home, scared to face my parents and uncertain of what I would do once I got there.

A mother always knows when her baby is upset, and the blood covering my clothes did nothing to persuade her that nothing was wrong. All I had was a blackened eye—Garry had gotten in at least one good shot—and it was obvious that the blood couldn’t be mine. I nearly sprinted back to my room, my hair and face in disarray.

There wasn’t even a knock ten seconds later before my door flew open once again. She needed only one good look at me to know that something dreadful had occurred; it took maybe all of five seconds for my father to follow her inside, both of them barging in without asking. Given the circumstances, I wasn’t about to choose that moment to argue about privacy.

“Oh my god! Did you kill someone?” Her voice rang, tinged with the fear that my answer might be an affirmative. “Wait; don’t tell me.”

My mother was a lawyer. And my father? A Criminal Court Judge, swiftly moving up the ranks of judiciary officials. Less than five years ago, he had been an attorney, much like my mother. He climbed ever higher, but she held herself back a little, preferring to allow him the spotlight. Women always trailed behind their husbands in those days. I can’t remember one that put herself first, as hard as I try. Looking back, I know that I pitied her then, in that moment, with her fear-struck eyes a mirror for the stormy clouds upon which I gazed as I walked home. I pitied her, this self-sacrificing woman who would never have the son she deserved.

And so I sat there, running my hands through my hair and apologizing after every other word as I brokenly tried to explain. I steered clear of anything resembling motive, letting them think that it was just, I don’t know, teenage hormones or whatever. Testosterone. Just something that guys do.

I told them as much of the truth as was necessary, and my mother comforted me through her anger as my father had a second beer in the living room, calm only after a call from one of his friends on the force. I knew from the look on his face that someone was already en route to my house, but I couldn’t place the hidden emotion in his eyes.

I wasn’t particularly surprised that Garry immediately turned me in. In some ways, I needed for him to do that. It took the burden off of my shoulders, knowing that I was going to have to pay for my deeds. I was going to have to pay for the blood and the sickening thud of that his skull against the pavement. Just the thought of it turned my stomach, and I was still retching in the bathroom when the police arrived nearly twenty minutes later, almost three hours after the fight.

My thoughts should have been on myself in those moments, in how I was going to save my baseball scholarship to Rice. But they weren’t. My mind kept tumbling through the images again and again, playing them like they were dice in Yahtzee, rolling around forever in that little cup, jumbling into a million little dots of memory. Dice thudding against my skull, bruising from the inside.

The dotted cubes blurred together, every second a repetition of the shock of the first blow, the way his skin seemed so easy to bruise. That’s where they found me, the two uniformed officers standing outside the door as my mother helped me up and back into the living room.

“They just want to talk to you,” my father’s voice was quiet, in a way that I guess he assumed would be comforting.

I didn’t deserve comfort. I was guilty. Aggravated assault. Battery. Possibly even attempted murder. All of this was fault. I was a stupid asshole and he hadn’t deserved any of it and it should have been me and next time it could be and… and… and then nothing.

My parents exchanged niceties with them. Southern hospitality dictated that they each were entitled to a cool glass of tea and cookies, if they were so inclined, before we actually got down to business. Looking back, it was no surprise to me that both of them indulged in the tea, sipping slowly for a few minutes or so. They were so calm, so leisurely about all of this. I don’t think they understood what they were here for, what I had done. Why it was wrong.

I sat down while they remained standing, their uniforms and sidearm more than intimidating. I was so scared. The police, however… they were determined to make life easy for me. All they wanted me to say was that I didn’t know what they were talking about. That I hadn’t done anything, and they’d be willing to overlook the evidence to the contrary. Evidence like Garry’s story and identification of the perpetrators. Evidence such as the cracked ribs Aaron had given him, an injury that would take months to heal. Evidence like the barely dried blood on my shirt.

As much as it pains me now to say it, I let them let me get away with it.

“It was just some kids letting off some steam,” Officer Mendoza’s moustache twitched a little as he spoke. “And the fag’s parents aren’t going to press any charges. They never do, in cases like this. Not when they know their kid had it coming.”

He gave my shoulder a pat, and I forced a smile. Had it coming, he said. If I told him my secrets, would he think I deserved it too?

“So, Nicky, real shame that this is your last year. I saw that last game, and, man, you really could be something.” He laughed, and I went along with it, chatting like nothing had happened, coolly finishing off his glass.

The entire time, I wished this were a just a hallucination. The real police would show up soon, to take me in like they would take any other criminal who beat another human being into a bloody mess. They would confirm that I wasn’t the only one who knew that it shouldn’t have ever happened.

“What’re you gonna do now that football season’s over?” His partner joined in.

I wanted to know that what I was wasn’t wrong. That if it had been me... that somebody would care. Their lack of humanity and sense of justice shocked me.

“Baseball,” I muttered. “I’m going to play baseball.”

My father’s proud smile could have been seen from miles away as he lifted his beer and sipped before saying, “You know, he really impressed the scouts last year. They gave him a baseball scholarship to Rice and everything.”

Both officers nodded sagely, as if they had expected for something of the sort to happen.

Mendoza shook his head softly, “Damn, I remember back when he was just a little kid in my wife’s Sunday School class. Who’d have thought it, eh? Well, we always knew you’d raise a fine kid.”

They were the real police though, and they were so very different from my boyhood images of them. Even growing up with both of my parents in the legal system and having more policemen than I could count over at my house, I had still retained the fantasy that they were good people who just wanted to uphold the law. I could tell by my mother’s face that she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this was not the way things were supposed to be. I clung to that thought, the knowledge that I wasn’t alone in my confusion.

I also knew that she loved me too much to let them do anything to me.

He toyed with the hat in his hand for a moment before placing it back on his head, a signal that the time had come for both officers to take their leave. I listened, numb, as my father escorted them to the door, the conversation still running through sports figures of the day.

I wasn’t a good person. I hadn’t been a good person in a long time, not since she was here. And I had done more bad things after she left. It was years later, and I had even broken the law. Not just having a few beers while being underage or any of that stupid shit, but really breaking the law.

I didn’t have the right temperament for this sort of thing. Any other stupid little kid would have been happy at this moment. A combination of my father’s status as a judge, my place on the football team, and perhaps luck had determined that I would get off scot-free. Instead, my feelings bounced from pain to sadness, guilt to fear, and anger to nausea.

That was the moment, I think, that I knew something was wrong. That the constructs extended further than just football. All of it was. Society was a construct. My ideas about who these people were supposed to be were nothing more than what society had taught me to believe. Police are good. Criminals are not. But no, before they became police or criminals, they were merely human. People didn’t fall into this binary of good and bad; humans have never been as simplistic as children are taught.

All of it was a set of little rules and contracts and teams. It was our team against the others, against those that acted differently. But I couldn’t do this anymore. These two sides? They did not exist. I couldn’t view the world in the same way.

That’s the only moment from high school that stands out; the others are sand through my fingers. Each grain slips and falls to the side as time passes. Even the details of Aaron’s death just days before graduation, when the roads are still slick enough that you don’t have to be as drunk as he was to spin out, are hazy. But I will never forget Garry.

Seven years later, he still haunted me.

By that time, I was on the force in Dallas. Partnered with this real nice guy named Frank. What can I say about Frank, except that he was a cop, and it was only the 90s. Not much different from the 80s, if you catch my drift. Frank was a real ladies man. Had one hanging off of his arm everywhere he went, most days. Sure knew how to hook ‘em.

Things went well with Frank, I guess you could say. We got along and didn’t get into each other’s hair most of the time. Things between us worked. Sure, we weren’t the best team in the world, but it wasn’t so as I’d leave him if he accidentally spilled a beer or two in my car. Which he did, on occasion.

No, what got me about Frank, in the end, was that he was just like I had been, back then. He hated queers with a passion rivaling that of most Klan members I knew. Looking back on it, he probably was a Klan member, or at least had been to a meeting or two. Hated blacks as much as he hated fags. Don’t get me wrong, I was never into that kind of mess, but I knew a fair few of them. Can’t grow up any place in Texas outside of Austin without knowing some.

Things between us went south after one case, and not south in the good way. South as in, he screwed up someone’s life, the Captain refused to do anything about it, and I left. Packed my stuff, went to the Crime Lab. That was it.

Well, okay, that wasn’t all of it. This one case just hit too close to home, I guess. A real nice kid, Daniel, he came out to his parents and got knocked around a few too many times for it after that. Kid went ballistic, threatened to kill himself, and the dad just took that as the next offense against God. Beat him into submission, but not before the kid nicked him one or two times. Everyone gets in a lucky punch once and a while. So, anyways, the father decided that would be a good time to get the kid out of his life once and for all, so he filed charges against him. Aggravated assault, of all things, when it was clearly self-defense. Frank went along with it, went to trial as the arresting officer. The kid owes the three years he spent in jail to Frank’s testimony. Against an officer and a deacon, his word meant nothing.

I protested it every step of the way. Vehemently. I didn’t want Daniel to turn into another Garry. He deserved better than that. No matter what I did, though, it didn’t help. It wasn’t going to change what happened. I see that now. I tried so hard to make up for what I had done, and none of it mattered.

The last time I saw Frank was the day that I quit my job. I moved over to the lab. It seemed, in a way, to be what should have happened. What needed to be done.

I guess, in a way, that one night all those years ago is what’s shaped me. I never had to pay the penance I had coming to me; I’m still trying to pay it off, case by case. It’s why I won’t ever slant the evidence in a case. It’s why I am who I am today.

It’s not really something I’ve ever told anyone, especially not Greg. Yes, I gaybashed someone. Yes, I am gay.

Rather incongruous, I know. And at the same time, it still makes so much sense. I, well, I know I need to tell him. I need to get it off my chest, or else I’ll always be the scared kid walking home in the rain. I’ll always be running from what I’ve done, and I can’t do that anymore.

My mom put it to me perfectly, three weeks ago when I finally came out to her. “Nicky, sometimes you grow up, and sometimes you really grow up.”