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The thing about being burned by Terry-
The thing of it is-
It's a last resort.
Terry's a punk, has always been, and something changed the shape of him in juvie, and something else sharpened him in high school, but he's never-
Nelson's never seen him look at someone, look through them, like they're a lost cause. People - lots of people, people who don't pay attention, who maybe don't look at Terry so closely, who haven't followed the crashing trash fire career of his life and haven't turned over and over in their heads how he tripped straight into the lucky hand whenever it really seemed to matter - those people would probably blame Dana for that.
Nelson wouldn't even blame them.
Dana's good, she loves people, she believes in redemption or at least doing better and meaning it. Letting that action shape and redefine a history of terrible choices, of mistakes. She did that for Terry. She did that for Nelson, before he'd really even understood that the chips on his shoulder were what's making the trouble more than his old man ever could. So he gets it. Making that mistake.
But Terry. Well, maybe it's not fair to say that Terry would never have gotten into so much trouble if he weren't more loyal than he was smart. Terry found his way to trouble before he found Charlie. He found his way to trouble after it.
Someone could argue his old man did, too, though. (Nelson doesn't know who that someone is. Doesn't know anyone that tactless and careless, who also knows Terry, who also knows enough to hurt him, and is willing to try.)
No one thinks of Warren McGinnis as someone who made bad choices. He's just a tragedy. He's just bad collateral. Messy.
Nelson knew that when he heard it on the news. Knew that when that same news spread through the hall like a virus, twice as sickening and horribly contagious. The thing Nelson took all the way to college to figure out, though, is that probably made it worse.
But Nelson thinks, given enough time and separation, enough real guilt or good-faith, Terry could move past an insult. He's got damningly good instincts, and he's a straight up punk but he's almost always been on the level about seeing the difference between careless mistake and something more mean-spirited.
They wouldn't be friends if Terry didn't believe in second chances. In thirds and fourths and fifths. Nelson doesn't have a lot left, but he's got pride, and a stack of issues with Terry's face under every layer but he's grown enough to know that Terry had almost nothing to do with that, except he never backed down from a fight if it meant someone scrawnier could slink away.
Nelson needed all those chances, even if he burned through a few fistfuls inside of a blistering four months trying to pull himself out of a tailspin despite knowing he never would. Nelson would've rather just gotten drunk, into a car crash, but Gotham didn't have any trees outside the parks and for all the fights he'd started and ended he'd never wanted to take anyone out with him.
He'd never even really been suicidal. But it was easier to think about Blade, perfectly and shallowly put together and weighing action against reputation splashing punch in his face for being a pig than to take any deep looks at himself.
He wouldn't want to deprive the world of her, and for a few strung out months there'd have been no other way.
He'll never ask if she knew that.
Kind of like he'll never ask how Terry knew, homeless with a carefully guarded acceptance letter, where to find him.
He'd been watching something different come alive up close and at a distance for two years by then. That night, he saw it all at once - Terry McGinnis, wide awake and reading the inside of his head with his hands buried in the pockets of his dad's jacket, the fit of it closer and closer to right every day. He never did figure out what it was. Even now, sitting in the food court of a plaza, he's never seen it that close and directly again. Just fleeting glimpses of all the little things Terry picked up to make it this far.
Dana blames Bruce Wayne. Nelson thinks she's onto something, not quite right but not far off. The proof is how quiet Max gets whenever they skirt too close to saying it out loud. Mostly, the peace in their friend group is predicated on the idea that it has nothing to do with Terry at all. Mostly, they're there for Dana, who's the only one who loved him and had him and was smart enough to let him go.
Again and again. Nelson doesn't know if he could take it, rebounding over and over the way they do. When he and Blade broke off, for real, it was the first time and the last time. When it felt like goodbye, Blade was smart enough to make it stick. They didn't do the solo thing for a year, just to be safe, but he thinks they could have hung out the next week and the only thing that would be different is that they wouldn't feel like they had to perform the rote act of snuggling and making out as if either of them were feeling it.
He's positive he'd never be able to do that with Terry. Not that they were ever - not that he wanted to - it's just that Terry's under his skin. Always. Everywhere. Has been since the third grade, grinning wide and stealing Nelson's favorite sucker right from his desk, right in front of Nelson, and putting it in his mouth just because Nelson made sure everyone knew it was his favorite and that he had it and no one else did.
He's pretty sure Terry doesn't remember saying it wasn't that good before holding it out to Nelson to have back. He's positive Terry remembers getting shoved and all the crinkled wrappers Nelson had shoved into his backpack at recess.
It had really kind of set a tone; Dana's the only one who remembers that they used to get along before middle school. When Nelson's ego was contained, they traded things all the time. Favor for favor - Nelson has a half-memory that feels fake the further he gets from it: Terry would have these little sandwiches, ham and cheese and tomato and lettuce and some sauce that wasn't mayo - was spicy and white and perfect at room temperature because his mom used to have time to make it.
Nelson would give him a fistful of fruit snacks, the ones on the commercials, pricey because they were commercialized and came with a brand and cartoon shapes in neon colors and bursts of flavor. He'll never know if they couldn't afford it or if Mary and Warren were just more frugal. Terry got the snacks his parents wouldn't buy for him, Nelson got the lunch his parents wouldn't make for him - and so maybe Terry's first act of war had been less about teaching Nelson humility and more about jealousy but the point is it doesn't matter.
They'd had hundreds of little favors for hundreds of little things. And then there'd been a divorce, and then juvie, and then a different divorce, and Nelson had seen just enough to put his anger into sports instead of the gangs that always hovered too close, and then there'd been high school. All four messy years of it. A different kind of reunion, the first time Nelson saw Terry in the hall and decided to square up in the bad boy's way.
They'd called him the new kid.
That had pissed Nelson off more than anything, that they could switch buildings and a couple of years and forget him. He'd gone out of his way to make it clear he hadn't forgotten. Had gotten in Terry's face, until tired blue eyes ticked over into annoyance and McGinnis had stopped looking past him in favor of looking right at him .
Nelson has maybe spent about seven years - maybe about ten years if he's honest - overinvested in making sure that Terry always looks at him.
And there's nothing endearing about that. Frankly, it's unhinged behavior. He checks himself, sometimes, but never enough. And if there's any saving grace, it's that everyone knows that Terry's a good guy about 70% of the time and maybe a quarter of that is exclusively because Dana will be mad at him otherwise, but the other 20% Terry's just as unhinged as anyone who grows up in Gotham and never leaves and the last 10% is excessive beyond even that.
But Terry's never burned him.
All those fights, all that stupid energy, and Terry still looks at him like maybe he'll have something to say - even if that something is bound to piss Terry off. He'll sit there and wait and listen. The patience is new, the way he's starting to look less preemptively annoyed and more just generally impatient is learned behavior, but it's a chance and Nelson hasn't squandered it yet.
So it's jarring, makes Nelson look too, when Terry's eyes flit a little restlessly around the food court and lock two seconds longer on someone and then go a little bit empty with contempt.
It should've been hard to figure out who he was looking at. Nelson props his elbow on the table, his cheek on his fist, and the second his eyes find a gaunt figure in loose clothes, hair dark and pulled back and looking unkempt picking at his food at a lone table something catches in Nelson's hindbrain. He's familiar, and Nelson's got no idea why, but he knows him.
The face is familiar, he thinks even the bruised eyes might be - he's carrying that sleep deprived look all of them have, that Nelson has had ever since he took Terry's stilted, awkward fucking offer the winter post-graduation and that Terry's had ever since sophomore year of high school.
He won't ask.
"Carter Wilson," Terry tells him anyway, right before taking an aggressive bite of his sandwich with both elbows on the table like he's digging them down to keep himself still. He probably is.
Nelson grunts, but it takes him the whole time of grabbing his cup and getting his mouth around the straw to figure out why he knows the name. When he does he bites down on his straw, jaw shifting with agitation.
The Max thing had been a quiet affair in that no one had died (chiefly: Max) and the loudest thing in that it been Jokerz trying to kill a classmate.
That probably wouldn't have mattered as an isolated incident. Nelson had gotten into fights with them as a kid. Terry had, obviously, but even before he'd had a personal vendetta against clowns and spray paint. But it had been a classmate, one that Terry had been seen around more and more often, and it had been one of their own.
Terry insisted he'd never been the target of that. It hadn't been someone leaning on his trauma trying to recreate a painful event with a different victim. Obviously: no one in his family had been in danger, let alone hurt. But it had been Terry's friend, where Max had mostly been happy to excel and be sassy and, damningly, alone. And it had been Carter Wilson, leader of one of the splintered Jokerz cells trying to kill her.
Over grades, if Max and Terry were to be believed.
Nelson hadn't especially needed any extra convincing.
He's not doing anything now, though. He looks pale, from far away, and he probably is - but it's just as probably not face paint. He doesn't look like he could lift heavy weights, which doesn't quite go against Nelson's hazy memory of him, but fits the profile he'd more or less expected from the runner-up valedictorian.
Unfair, because Nelson knows plenty of insultingly smart people who look like they'd happily bench press a fucking truck. His gym is almost exclusively that kind of guy, with Nelson himself the odd-one out because he's more jock than nerd and happy to stay that way, but.
Well.
There's no accounting for the Willie Watts of the world.
At least Terry looking like he's waiting for a reason makes more sense. Almost as much as the way he's staring at Nelson instead of Wilson. Some of the residual iciness fades, the longer Nelson chews on his straw with an itch between his knuckles he's got no business acting on.
"Guess he got released at some point," Terry says carefully, and just like that Nelson wonders if that's why they're here having lunch instead of the office, the bistro, that new shitty diner that Terry's been fascinated by for the past month.
Hell, they could have just gone to the food court in the Wayne-Powers building and gotten food reminiscent of just about anywhere in the world.
"Recent?" Nelson asks, and there's no reason for Terry to know the answer to that except for the way he's that extra 10%. He hesitates, and Nelson kicks his ankle before he can talk himself into lying. Kicks his shin a little harder when his mouth just pinches in at the corners.
"Probably not," Terry hedges, giving him a filthy look and playing with a fry like he might flick it into Nelson's eye if he keeps on his bullshit.
"You want to get out of here?" Nelson asks. He knows the answer before he asks. Even if they come here just for the walk and the half-hearted reminder they're technically students who should spend more time on campus than in corporate offices, Terry's seen him now.
They're not going anywhere. They might not be following Wilson when he gets up to leave, but Nelson's familiar enough with the man Terry is now that if they leave and Wilson hurts someone in the lunch court, he's gonna carry that like their pain is his right to hold.
Nelson can't figure out if it's selfless or selfish, the way he keeps dragging problems onto his shoulders.
Unhealthy, though.
(Nelson's got about five books that all spell out with different words and theories all the ways it's incredibly unhealthy. He's going to wrap up the most obtuse one and give it to Terry as a Christmas present, the appropriate pages and chapters earmarked for his review.
Dana's going to give him a card to go with, Top 10 Self Care Tips, and a self help book on gardening that he won't throw away because his little brother's best friend is currently at the frenzied height of manic greenhouse maintenance. Matt's been helping him, which means that Terry has an unruly number of plant facts stuck in his head that have been keeping him up at night.
Yesterday, Nelson cheerfully told him that plants fall asleep under anesthetic just like people mostly to watch him twitch. The boss had overheard, corroborated Nelson's claims with a string of technical jargon that was much more formal and accurate but less funny than Nelson's claim, and Terry had decided to remove himself from the executive floor before he threw a chair at either of them.
Nelson had looked at him askance after Terry had left. He'd stumbled across it as part of his studies; Damian Wayne had affixed him with a speaking look that was a little bit blood curdling, though all he'd had to say on the matter was, "Fifty years ago I was a teenager in this city."
He'd looked surprised and a little bit annoyed when Nelson had asked if Poison Ivy was ever as publicly sympathetic as Mr. Freeze. He'd made a quick, professional exit when Nelson had asked him if he had any personal stories of the original Batman.)
"Do you think he's lonely?" Nelson asks after five minutes of Terry shifting sullenly in his chair, too stubborn to say they wouldn't leave and potentially have to talk about why and too contrary to say that they should and risk getting into a fight when Nelson inevitably took him at his word and stood up to call him out on his bluff.
"Wilson," Nelson clarifies when Terry stares wide-eyed at him.
"No," Terry says immediately. Nelson tugs off the plastic lid of his drink and tips it enough to tongue out some ice. Terry grimaces; it has nothing to do with Nelson at all. "I don't know. Maybe. I don't care."
He means the last one. Nelson can tell.
Jokerz don't uniformly get zero chances at a redo, but they get a lot less. Existing in shitty clown makeup isn't quite enough for Terry to get involved with them. It's the only give he offers - even the T's have to get physical to Terry to throw a punch.
Jokerz just have to open their mouth.
Nelson might lend weight to the knowledge that Bruce Wayne's valet shouldn't be getting into fights with gang members on the side for a laundry list of reasons that start with the security of his boss, except if that were a requirement for his job then he'd have been hired for maybe a month before he got fired again and they wouldn't be so goddamn weird .
"Not like you, to want someone to cause trouble," Nelson says. This time, Terry's the one to kick him. The tips of his shoes are sharp. He feels a little bit like he got stabbed in the shin, and instead of stepping on the shiny black dress shoes and scuffing them he makes a show of stretching his leg out to the side and checking for blood.
"I don't," Terry says, biting bitterly into a fry. He'd be glaring, but his shoulders are slumped and curled forward so it's really more of a pout.
On down the list of guesses Nelson goes.
"Think someone will mess with him," Nelson says.
"I don't know," Terry groans, exasperated, graduating to dropping his head in his hands. "Probably not. Why would they?"
Former leader of a Jokerz gang, Nelson could see it if they were more accomplished. Maybe. But Carter Wilson isn't J-Man, and none of them are the Joker, because they're all a dime a dozen and petty besides. Terminal had been concerned, exclusively, with the affairs of Hamilton High. At least J-Man had some sense of scope.
"This is stupid," Terry says to himself. Nelson steals one of his fries. "He's not doing anything."
But he had done something. And Terry's is pretty big about forgiveness, but Nelson thinks he and Dana are still the only ones that know it's because Terry knows what it's like to hold a grudge forever.
It's probably for both their sakes that Nelson reminds him, "Stalking is a crime."
It makes Terry snort, startled into a laugh that skirts around incredulity, but his eyes crinkle when he peeks through his fingers at Nelson.
"I'm not stalking him. I just saw him in a crowd and recognized him. Jesus, Nash."
And sure, that's what happened. Nelson was here the whole time. Couldn't have been anything else.
Terry always scans crowds. Always looks for threats. Always clocks exits, too. There's nothing objectively wrong with finding trouble, especially when you go looking for it.
It's close to a bluff, but Nelson doesn't know how to call him on it. He looks in Wilson's direction again - he's halfway through his meal, meticulously neat - and sees past him this time.
"You want ice cream?" Nelson asks, looking at the swirly cone and blue sign.
"Nelson, no," Terry says, all tension. This is the 20% unhinged Gotham kind of no, though. The kind they learn by surviving to adulthood, in a city like Gotham, which isn't the worst and hasn't been since his boss was a kid but isn't the best. Has always, since its foundation, been a little off.
Those who weren't born with it don't survive. Those who can't handle it move a city over, generally to become part of the crime element in a place like Metropolis.
That's not something Nelson can prove. That's just city pride.
"Alright," Nelson says, rolling to his feet before Terry can trip him. "Just some for me then."
Terry hisses something at him which Nelson blithely ignores. It’s mostly a straight shot from their table to the little ice cream front, Wilson’s table is the one off-center, so Nelson would have to go out of his way to take a friendly stop by Wilson’s table.
Not a long route, but a noticeable one.
He doesn’t.
He doesn’t even look - Wilson’s just a guy eating a meal, and if Terry wasn’t such a freak of nature he’d never have hit Nelson’s radar except the fuzzy hit of nostalgia. Nostalgia is not something that Nelson particularly goes looking for.
Chocolate swirl, half the size of his face, and apparently the gimmick is sticking fruit into the cone because there are strawberries cut and dripping down the cone edge, making a mess of the base of the cone and his fingers before the ice cream has even melted while the fruit tries ambitiously to treat the cone like the rim of a cup.
He prevaricates a little bit on getting a bowl - but he’d already ordered the cone, and at this point it feels a little insulting to dump the thing ice cream first into one. He bites into the top instead, already turning, and isn’t surprised to see Terry leaned casually against Wilson’s table with his arms crossed.
He’s saying something, and Wilson seems to be listening narrow-eyed and suspicious, but Terry isn’t looming over him. Has stayed politely on the far side of the table, has his body mostly angled away toward Nelson actually, and when Wilson opens his mouth Terry’s entire posture shifts toward something a little more polite for the plaza.
Sometimes it’s easier to see danger once it’s gone.
Nelson takes his time. Ambles away from both of them toward the steps that lead up and out of the food court. Catches from his peripherals Terry knock lightly on the table as he leaves to catch up.
“A job offer?” Nelson asks, when they’re four clothes stores, a tattoo parlor, and a comic store away. He didn’t see Terry slide Wilson a card but he wouldn’t have, between the distance and not looking until Terry was already striding away.
Terry rolls his shoulders, too jittery to really ease out the tension.
It’s not nearly as offensive as him stealing Nelson’s ice cream to tongue a strawberry free and sink his teeth into. Nelson lets him have it.
Hopes, fatalistically, that Terry might learn something about manners or picking battles by example.
“A referral,” he disagrees. “Not interested in working in the same building, but apparently getting arrested isn’t great for future careers.”
“No,” Nelson demurs, “but you’ve been doing so well.”
Terry snorts, and Nelson doesn’t see it coming but instinctively skip-hops back in time to avoid the sharp kick and sweep of Terry’s foot.
Terry scowls, and then rolls his eyes, offended at failing to hook Nelson’s ankle and evidently deciding playing it off like he’d done nothing wrong was better than acknowledging a loss.
This fucking dreg.
They walk far enough, side by side, that Nelson thinks that will be the end of it. Another weird snapshot moment in a series of them all near-exclusively involving Terry and Terry’s shitty impulse control.
He thinks Terry might feel it too; the window to gracefully bring it back up rapidly closing in correlation with the tense hunch of his shoulders.
Nelson’s about to shove him and tell him to spit it out or let it go, but Terry sighs gustily first.
“It was a good thing to do.” He’s telling himself, so Nelson doesn’t reply, and anyway he thinks they can both hear the rest of it just fine: A gesture of good faith.
But maybe he should have, because Terry side eyes him with something that isn’t uncertainty but is a little bit guarded.
Terry says, “He could have changed. He could be trying.”
“I’m not the one who went and talked to him,” Nelson says.
“But it bothered you,” Terry argues, because he’s incapable of letting anything go if it might mean Nelson has a good time, “him being there.”
“It didn’t,” Nelson says.
“Once you noticed him, it did.”
It hadn’t. Nelson isn’t sure where the idea is coming from or the confidence; Terry’s not bluffing.
“I don’t care what some dreg did as a teenager, Terry,” Nelson says. “He just caught my eye for a second.”
“And then it bothered you.”
Nelson shoulder checks him, miffed that he makes contact and Terry stumbles sideways with a yelp. He almost goes down, even, and winces with a heavy breath when Nelson goes the extra mile to catch him before he can. He wonders if he should text Chelsea, get her to buy a self-help book on personal reflection to add to his and Dana’s collection for Terry.
Doesn’t get how someone that keyed up can be so fucking stupid into his twenties.
…Maybe that’s why Coach still calls him a kid.
“I wasn’t watching him,” Nelson says. Thinks and nearly says, was watching you. Edits, “You were. Couldn’t figure out if you were gearing to start a fight or not.”
He thinks, maybe, some of the reasons they hadn’t could’ve been less to do with Terry’s maturity (he has it, in spades, but for only for the weirdest shit) and more to do with time. Getting ice cream doesn’t take long. Even Terry needs a little bit of wind-up.
“Why would I - I don’t want to fight him.”
There’d been a moment at high school graduation where Terry had said, low and grating and definitely not for Nelson’s ears, I don’t want to fight anyone .
They’ve never talked about that, either. Occasionally, though, Nelson thinks about it. The weight of those words, dragged out of Terry like a confession.
The bulky 70% of Terry that’s just trying to be better than he was, all the time, without any sense of scale when he backslides.
Terry doesn’t like making excuses for himself unless he’s deliberately making a joke.
Having met Matt, and the woman who raised both boys, Nelson’s pretty sure that’s just a McGinnis thing.
“You didn’t fight him,” Nelson points out, because he weirdly feels like he needs to.
“You thought I would.”
“I just said- shut up,” Nelson says, lifting a hand and then dropping it on Terry’s shoulder to steady him through a flinch. (Bruised side, maybe all the way to the rib, Nelson hadn’t seen the leg sweep coming but it had been stiff and slow and awkward to try. He’s not walking like he’s hurt, except when Nelson jostles him without warning. They’re in Gotham. No one walks like they’re hurt if they can avoid it.)
“I never know what you’re going to do, McGinnis. Frankly, I think it’s a miracle every day I don’t catch you rummaging through the trash.”
For a second Terry looks offended, startled out of his funk and bewildered by what, at this point, is just an observational fact.
No one in their friend group sees the kind of shit that goes on in Wayne-Powers Offices at the executive level except Nelson. Max is the only one who believes any of the things he says.
“That sandwich,” Terry says prickly all over, “was still entirely wrapped and perfectly good. Nothing was contaminated by it landing on a bunch of crumpled sticky notes in a trash can that gets emptied every night!”
“You’re a nightmare,” Nelson mutters, feeling the truth of it down to his bones. “And so, yeah, when your paranoid ass sees something that makes you look like you’re back in Freshman year I’m gonna notice, and no I don’t know what you’re gonna do. Because sometimes you act like a reasonable adult, and other times I’m saving you from the kinds of life choices that make me feel less like a secretary and more like a kindergarten wrangler.”
“I am-”
“Foil in the microwave.”
“That was-”
“A dare, I know. Fork in the garbage disposal.”
“I dropped it -”
“Literally two days ago I watched you put your hand into a blender that was still plugged in holding a paper towel.”
“...These don’t sound like problems kindergartens have.”
“Because they have caretakers that generally try to keep sharp objects away from sticky-fingered children, McGinnis.”
There’s a moment, more on Nelson’s side than Terry’s if he had to guess, where the pause is awkward and tense. He meant sticky-fingered literally.
Then Terry blows out a breath, snickering a little at the end.
“I didn’t expect to see him,” Terry says, but he sounds less defensive about it. “Was kind of surprised when I recognized him right away.”
“He could’ve killed Max,” Nelson shrugs. The school rumor mill had always been wild at Hamilton Hill, but the broad strokes of it were always pretty accurate.
“Over grades,” Terry says, bizarrely without inflection. Such a stupid thing. But.
At the time….
Nelson grimaces, and knows he’s going to have to open his mouth before Terry gets smug again thinking he knows everything.
“It’s all we had to focus on, most of the time, back then. Easy to make it feel like the only important thing in the world. The only way forward.”
He almost expects Terry to make a face himself. Brush it off, maybe. But instead he looks thoughtful. Nelson wonders what he’s thinking about, and then figures it’s probably Matt - a Sophomore in the thick of it now.
Matt’s always been a smart kid.
Nelson’s around enough smart people to figure out how awful that can be, even compared to the near-drop out with a sealed record.
“It doesn’t excuse it,” he adds firmly. “But, that doesn’t make handing out options a bad idea, either.”
Even if it did, Nelson couldn’t say a damn thing about it.
Terry had given him one of those options too, once upon a time.
It wasn’t the only thing Nelson had needed but it had helped a hell of a lot. Meant enough to keep him going.
He thinks, maybe, it’s not a bad thing at all for Carter Wilson to get to feel that, too.