#Brutus on the other hand remembers SOME stuff and is dealing with a lot of guilt at letting his brother down

[gay-caesar-truther]

Shepherd and Brutus are so everything to me. Two brothers in a shitty situation (Legion). Brutus sucks up to the commanders, to Caesar, to anyone for an OUNCE of power he can use to protect Shepherd- but he doesn't tell his brother WHY he's kissing ass. As a result Shepherd resents him for it- thinks he's pathetic and power hungry and he's forgetting everything the Legion did to their tribe for a bit more power.

If Brutus wasn't emotionally repressed and so violently protective just TALKED to his younger brother there would be no problems.

And then one of them dies at Hoover dam(which one depends on the playthrough as Shep is my independent courier, and Brutus my legion one) and the other has to deal with all this left over loss on resentment on their own.

[kootenaygoon]

So,

It was like Fantasia meets Pulp Fiction. 

For over a week now I’d been hyper and giddily elevated, hurriedly banging through my Star stories before marching home to get to work on my fiction. But the more I sat at my keyboard, the more I ended up thinking about Ryan Tapp. Which set me to sleuthing through social media, figuring out who he was friends with and searching out posts related to him. The guy was beloved, it was clear. I couldn’t find anything that seemed like a warning sign leading up to the event; the dude’s life seemed blissed out and uneventful. He knew one of my best friends, my little Aussie squirrel Lauren Herraman, and was tight with the lead singer of Val Kilmer and the New Coke.

Andrew Stevenson was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, like he was disappointed in me. The dude had been lurking.

“You’re not going to solve this crime on Facebook, Will. You have to actually do something. Do you know what it was like, climbing into my car on the way to a job? That feeling, you’ll never know that feeling unless you try it,” he said.

“There’s millions of murders in the world, but this one happened in your city. So this one is yours. That’s just how it works.”

I growled. “I’m a fucking arts reporter.”

“So what, you’re going to make me do this alone?”

“This is what police are for. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t want to carry this around in my head. I haven’t seen Ryan for like a year.”

Andrew chuckled. “Sometimes we don’t get to choose our company.”

“We can’t do anything until there’s an autopsy report, man. And right now everyone just thinks it was a suicide. So there’s no reason to reopen it.”

Andrew scoffed haughtily, and picked up his shotgun. “Fucking idiots.”

It was mission time. The first task was to figure out the identity of Ryan’s roommate. It didn’t take long to find him, and I didn’t approach him directly, but as the community came together to do a fundraiser for the other occupants of the property, his name kept popping up. I wondered if I would run into him in town, if I could get a chance to talk to him. Meanwhile, one of Ryan’s prominent musician buddies was currently having a very public mental breakdown all over social media. This stuff was a shit-storm of grief and doom. We walked up out of Brendan’s basement and sauntered over to Lakeside Park. Andrew kept the shotgun low at his side.

“Who are we looking for again?” I asked.

Andrew was driving my RAV, while I sat in the passenger seat. We bumped over the railway tracks and coasted out towards Red Sands. That’s where I would always find some sort of peace, cross-legged and bowing to Elephant Mountain. That’s what I needed to do, was get naked and go swimming. All this basement time was making me go a little weird. I wasn’t feeding myself, I was barely sleeping. What the fuck, exactly, was going on here? The world was bulging with colour and flash, throbbing all around me. I rolled down the window and looked out at the trees. When we arrived, we lugged a six-pack from the back of my RAV and took it rambling down the traintracks. We weaved down through the woods to the pink swath of rapture I loved most.

“We’re meeting Niles.”

“What, when did you make this plan? I’ve been avoiding him.”

“He’s noticed.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means Niles has underworld connections way beyond what you thought. And it’s him, it’s been him the whole time. He’s like the Marsellus Wallace of hard drugs in the Kootenays.”

I couldn’t believe it. “My Niles? I mean, I know he deals a bit, but...”

“But? A drug dealer’s a drug dealer.”

I shrugged. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

“I thought you were serious about solving this thing.”

I thought of all those heartbroken people on Facebook. I thought about Randy Tapp, Ryan’s father, who had reached out to me. Even in his darkest moments he had a powerfully positive energy, like he was vibrating on a different level. We ultimately ended up having lengthy phone conversations and long e-mail exchanges, but at first it was just friendly little bursts of well-wishes through Facebook Messenger. I’d never met the guy, but felt like I knew him on a strangely intimate level. And I agreed with him that there was something fucking foul going on with Ryan’s death. Even if it wasn’t a homicide, it needed to be something other than a suicide. Because a suicide made no sense.

Andrew cleared his throat. “When things were getting tight, and I knew I had to pull another job, I would just get this stress I could feel in my body. This heaviness. And sometimes I just wanted to take this shotgun and blow my brains out, Kurt Cobain-style.”

I smiled. “If I had a shotgun, you know what I’d do? I’d point it straight up at the sky and shoot heaven on down for you.”

He smiled. “Sublime. I fucking love Sublime.”

That’s when Niles arrived. He had two large dogs with him, and one was Snapper’s dog Brutus. I bristled at the idea of that dude. He’d gone to trial for rape in town and the day he got off posted on Facebook “NOT GUILTY” as he swankily strutted through the frame. I wanted to rip that fucker’s throat out and feed it to him.

“Breathe, Will. It seems like you’re losing control. You were doing so well, keeping track of the narrative. Now you’ve fucked it all up.”

“I just want to know what happened to him. I want someone to give me some legit answers about this. So if you know even a shred of something, can you tell me? Because I need to make some forward momentum with this. Like, for his Dad. I just think about his Dad, and what he went through, and I can’t take it. We have to figure this out.”

Niles put his hands on my shoulders, just like Brendan. Once I was calm, he began to speak in a low, even voice. “I asked around, okay? Ryan had a lot of different contacts all over the country and down in the States, he was a entrepreneur so he had things going on all over. If we were talking murder, it could have come from a whole variety of places.”

“Right.”

“That’s the first possibility, that the Bad Guys got him. And it’s a very real possibility. But much more likely is that it was his girlfriend. They were fighting, shit was violent, she’s a bit of a head case. So if you can buy that a woman offed her own boyfriend, that’s your second possibility.”

“And you knew him? Ryan?”

Niles smiled. “Knew him? I loved that kid.”

That’s when I remembered that I had an appointment. I was scheduled to meet with the Nelson Star publisher, Aaron Layton, to discuss my mental health benefits. I had been seeing a counselor and established a rapport, but she wasn’t covered under the new plan that had just been introduced by Black Press. I felt like I desperately needed some sort of mental health intervention, and I wanted to make sure he knew about that sooner rather than later. I sprinted back to the RAV alone and flew across town, coming to a stop right below his office. Before going upstairs I spritzed myself to hide any pot scent, and then took a moment to pull myself together.

When I entered the office, it still had the Carpenters’ bad energy. I couldn’t let it go, my anger for them. It was like a disease. I sat down across from Aaron and tried to be as amiable as possible.

“There have just been some heavy stories lately, and I’m starting to feel like my mental health is really deteriorating, right? So I’m worried that now I can’t see this counselor I don’t have any support. And I’m on antidepressants, which I think are supposed to be supervised,” I said.

Aaron blinked, blown back by my aggressive energy. “The trouble is the plan has to apply the same for everybody. I’m sure there are plenty of other counselors covered under the new plan.”

I stewed. I had no real problem with Aaron, because he was a giant improvement from the Carpenters, but it was almost like I innately gravitated towards an anti-establishment posture. Fuck the police, that sort of thing.

“I thought maybe you could find something for me. Like if I told you it was an emergency, we could work out a raise but instead of a raise I get counselling. Something like that. Because I’m so fucking broke I could scream.”

Eventually Aaron convinced me to take a pamphlet, and I headed back out to the parking lot to where Andrew was smoking. He laughed when he saw my dejection.

“We’ve got more hunting to do.”

The Kootenay Goon