Chapter Text
DEFEAT! flashes across Johnny’s TV screen to a distracted and uncaring audience. Pressed against the front wall, the device and accompanying Xbox is surrounded by overstuffed furniture and overflowing bookshelves. Light comes in primarily from across the room, an open archway leading to the kitchen, and there’s a dim hall connecting the room to the front door right beside it.
“Give it here, that was yer turn!” Johnny exclaims, chasing his younger brother Tom around the living room, trying to grab the Xbox controller out of his tight little fist. With no regard to his gamer score, he often allowed the kid to play Call of Duty on his account. It often resulted in scenes like this.
“No, that didnae count!!” The response comes out of Tom a sort of shrieking laugh as he bounds around the coffee table, skillfully avoiding the errant shoes, bags, and toys littering the ground.
“It definitely counted!”
Jumping on the couch, he clambers onto the back and attempts to hold the controller out of John’s way. Springs squeaking under them, John steps onto the couch as well, reaching for Tom and the controller at the same time.
Finally, mother MacTavish has had enough and yells at them from the kitchen.
“THOMAS! Don’t ye have schoolwork to tend to?” Freezing in their tracks, their roughhousing is effectively over. Johnny takes the controller from his brother’s loosening grip.
Sticking his tongue out, Tom sulks away. Flipping him the bird right back, Johnny takes his rightful place on the couch, kicking his feet up on the coffee table after grabbing his headset from under it.
Though he still lives with his mother Anne, ostensibly to help her and his step-dad with his two younger half-siblings, he didn’t feel the need to act any differently than he would if he lived alone.
Back in the lobby of the game, he looks through the gamertags of the other players. One stands out to him in particular: someone who talked a lot in the last game, AGhost. Johnny had been wearing the headset so no one knew it was his twelve year old brother playing, and also so his twelve year old brother didn’t hear anything his teammates had to say. But this guy had told some pretty funny (read: dumb) jokes before getting pissed off that they were losing. He clicks the name and sends a voice message without much thought.
“Why so salty?”
The clock ticks down until their next match is supposed to start.
He doesn’t expect a response from the stranger. Bored and hyper social, he sends a few of these messages every time he plays- if he took it seriously at all, his bon vivante personality alone could have made him the leader of a tight knit clan full of accomplished gamers. Instead, he treated it like it was just that: a game. He’d send out a bunch of messages because he thought he was being funny, and only ten percent of those would get a response. Maybe ten percent of that ten percent were added to his friends list and then promptly forgotten about.
Color him surprised when he gets a bite.
“Piss off, I carried your ass.”
Ooh, spicy. Grinning, he hits record to send another message.
“Apparently not since we LOST!” He laughs, loud and unrestrained.
“Sounds like you couldn’t care less.” The guy has a low register and a nice accent. He’d call it purring if there wasn’t such a coarse undercurrent to it.
“It’s a game, mate.”
Speaking of, they finally get loaded into a match, on opposing teams this time. Johnny does only marginally better than Thomas had. Chuckling, he checks for another message from AGhost before sending him a friend request, just in case he had anything else to say.
Then his mum asks him for help with the dishes, then his step-dad comes home and takes over the TV, then he has to help Thomas with his homework while the real adults put Mary to bed. That’s Thursday, done and dusted.
He forgets all about the friend request until the next day, when he finds it’s been accepted. AGhost is already playing and he hops into a game with him. The guy is insanely good. Every match they play together, he’s at the top of the leaderboard. Existing parallel to him and his clan makes Soap feel a tiny bit inadequate, which he quickly obscures with comedy.
Playing casually in the middle of his chaotic life- a few games before dinner, one or two on the weekend- Johnny finds it funny when people take it more seriously than was due. Their dedication to the game made them easy to get a rise out of. AGhost certainly seemed to be one of them, if his reaction to Johnny dying and then giggling about it is any indication.
“What the fuck were you thinking!” True anger bleeds into the question. Quipping no more, his voice has a hard edge to it that had been absent the day before.
“Thought I could make it across in time.” AGhost just growls at him, that’s the only way that noise could be classified, and he stifles his own reaction- more laughter. He wasn’t the best asset to have on your team if you wanted to win.
“Why am I even playing with you…” and yet, curiously, he continues. He easily could have kicked John out of the lobby or left it himself.
Johnny is tickled. Like most men in their twenties, he relishes in a good power struggle. It’s not that serious was practically his motto, and saying it to a person who was already melting down caused in him a heady mixture of superiority and untouchability; as though he had never taken anything too seriously and was all the better for it.
Of course, this is undeniably wrong because there are lots of things that Johnny takes seriously.
“Ye don’t have to suffer much longer, I‘m loggin’ off soon- it’s mum’s birthday tomorrow.”
“Who woulda thought Soap was a mama’s boy?” AGhost ribs him. His clan all start laughing. Soap is an outsider that had been trolling them all night- the perfect target.
“Calm down the lot of ye- isn’t a big deal!” That hadn’t been the exact reaction he was expecting, but he had to remember what an immature platform he was on. Honestly, it wasn’t his mum’s birthday- it was the anniversary of his dad’s death. His older sisters and himself were all going to visit his grave. Assuming the response to that would have been even more irreverent, he tried to pick something less notable. It’s possible he miscalculated.
“Gotta go beddie-bye so mummy can push you around in your pram?” Shrinking in his seat, he debates sticking around for another match.
A chorus of laughter washes over the lobby. For the first time that night Johnny is at a loss for words. He knew he wasn’t the best asset to have on your team if you wanted to win, but at least his trolling only went as far as the game world. Usually.
“Is she hot?” Their behavior made sense but he didn’t need to stick around for it. Standing, he holds down the power button on his Xbox 360 like he is suffocating it with a pillow.
Then he goes to bed.
The next day finds him worn out and empty. Sarah and Catherine meet him at home and they drive together to the cemetery. The temperatures were down and the wind was strong, too. Bundled in their coats, they clean up the gravestone and leave new flowers. Living closest to him, Johnny makes it down as often as he can; it’s nice not to be alone this time.
Every year they do this, for nearly a decade now, standing around and telling stories to whatever piece of him was still there. They cried, drank a toast to dear old dad, and then they cried some more.
Staying for dinner, the two sisters get to know their two half siblings better. They lived a long drive away, and the kids were growing so fast, they were totally different people from the last time they were in town.
It had been strange, at first, to adjust to the growing individuals in the family- Hell, it had been strange for them when their mother started dating again.
Their parents’ divorce had been quick and dry, leaving the kids with speculation alone, and a stubborn hope that maybe they would reunite. Then mum had found Peter and it was stunning how much the two were made for each other- a total departure from the cold, distant energy she and their father, Graham, had unwittingly filled their home with. Neither of them had been bad people. Getting pushed into marriage young, they had merely grown apart.
Then the new kids came along and everyone was weird about it for a while, again. After all, sixteen year old Johnny had never expected to see his mother pregnant. Strapped for space in their three bedroom house, Catherine and Sarah flew the coop one after another, freeing their old room up for Thomas’s nursery. Johnny never really had the same ambition. He’d go back and forth between his dad’s place and Anne’s, but as an eighteen year old burnout with more interest in firecrackers than in getting a job, he never made an effort to get his own place.
They weren’t pressed for space again until Mary came along. Converting the attic into a livable room started with the positive pregnancy test and finished a long time later. After his dad’s cancer diagnosis, John didn’t spend more than three days in a row at Anne’s house. Crashing on the couch at Graham’s post-divorce bachelor pad and then, eventually, the stiff armchair in his hospital room, Johnny dedicated every moment he had to his father.
But that was a long time ago, now, and things had changed even when that one thing, that one person being gone, stayed the same. Catherine had gotten married, Sarah was close behind. Reckless ne’er do well Johnny, against all odds, landed a job he loved. Forever fledging and never flying, he made do in that attic, drove his half siblings around, helped Anne with whatever she needed, tried not to think about how he was getting older and his dad would never see it.
In the living room, in the present, Mary and Thomas bombard their older sisters with Pokemon card binders and the new episode of Buzz and Tell. Life moves on for the living.
Catherine corners John, that night, as Anne and Peter clear the table after dinner.
He’s peeling an orange in the garden so he doesn't have to share it, looking up at the dusk in the sky. Stopping by the back door, she looks at him, waiting to see if, maybe, he’ll talk first. He doesn’t.
“I haven’t been feeling well.”
“Oh?”
“I’m getting some scans done. A biopsy, if the doctor says.”
He turns to face her in the threshold. Warm light from the kitchen envelopes her, nearly obscuring her features.
“Oh.” He knows exactly what she’s implying. Muted, familiar fear begins to circle and make a home in his limbs, in the back of his throat.
“Sorry to dump this on ye.”
“No, no- glad ye could tell me in person. Don't be afraid to call, alright?”
She nods.
“Don’t tell mum- for now. Sarah knows.”
He nods.
“Alright. Alright. Need anything?”
She shakes her head.
“Alright. I love you.”
She nods. He steps forward, and hugs her.
He doesn’t sleep well that night, skittish. At breakfast, they lock eyes and Catherine grimaces before looking away.
Then the weekend was over and they packed up their stuff, heading their separate ways. The kids went to school and the grown ups went to work- except for Johnny. He didn’t have any gigs lined up for the next week, had been completely wrung out, and was ready to distract himself.
So, he plants himself on the couch and turns on the Xbox.
There’s a message waiting for him in his inbox.
’Too far…sorry.’
John is shocked. He had forgotten about the teasing, over the past two days, and he certainly had no expectation of an apology. AGhost had chased him away and felt bad about it. It was sweet, in a twisted way.
It’s noon on a Monday, so the guy isn’t even online. John plays anyway, and no one has to know that he actually tries this time. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if he could make AGhost feel anything other than abject frustration during their games together. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if he could think about anything other than his sister’s impending doom. Even though it was little more than an inkling, little more than fatigue and shortness of breath, it dominated his mind.
Grinding sucks. There’s a reason he hadn’t done it before. Paying attention, checking his six, actually getting into the game- immersing himself- it was all really only possible because no one else was home right now. Maybe that was AGhost’s deal; he had no one to distract him in the real world. Hopefully he didn’t have a girlfriend or something that he was ignoring. The fewer negative stereotypes either one of them fulfilled, the better.
AGhost finds him that night with a slightly better k/d and tired thumbs. He had played through Mary and his mother getting home, played through dinner, and had successfully fended off his step-dad’s use of the TV. Why he wanted so badly to hang out with the other gamer, he couldn’t begin to explain, but as soon as that little bubble pops up in the upper right corner of his screen, AGhost Online, he grins.
It takes a second, but Johnny gets an invite to a private lobby, just like before.
“Mummy’s boy is back!” Someone with the username ‘roachesfordinner’ is quick on the draw, speaking the moment Soap’s connection is complete.
“Shut up, Roach.” Weakly, he fends him off, wondering if it was going to be the same situation as the other night.
‘Borderline_Rude’ is the next to have a little microphone icon pop up next to his name.
“Someone got his feelings hurt- yo mames!”
Breathing deep, he knows exactly what stops him from trolling people: getting no reaction. Fading into the background, he lets the people who already know each other talk it out.
If he could get through tonight without any nicknames they would forget about it. Laugh about something else. There would always be the next thing. Always someone else that would slip up and make themself a target.
“Rudy, shut the fuck up. Can we talk strategy?” AGhost’s voice saying that is a surprise, one that he is thankful for. Their rapidly developing friendship had, perhaps, reached a new level.
Anne waves at him as she goes to bed, reminding him to keep the volume low, and he waves back, dramatically mouthing the words, love you. Laughing, she rolls her eyes and shuffles off to bed.
“Ghost, this guy sucks anyway, why do you keep inviting him?” What was Ghost gonna say to that? It was true. He didn’t even raise morale most of the time.
“If you don’t like it you can play in a different fucking lobby- nut up because it’s only a few more seconds before it starts and it’s fucking Nuketown.”
No one leaves. Johnny hits the breaks on trolling and puts his nose to the grindstone. Trying to prove his worth, or be anything above dead weight, he’s glad that Ghost stood up for him. It was quite endearing, actually, in its own way. Being a tough guy’s soft spot was never a crime.
He plays the whole night with them without incurring their wrath again, and Ghost actually tells him he did a good job when he logs off for the night. Laying in bed, he can’t help but think that the practice had been worth it.