#catch me wrestling with john's characterization behind the local waffle house

[radiojamming]

Are you open for requests? Sorry to bug ya if you're not. I find the lack of love for John funny so here is my 2 cents. Deputy and John havin a moment, probs sittin on the front porch of an abandoned countryside home or on one of those little porch swings, watchin the fireflies while talking shit about life/past? Probably end up with mutual quietness, arguing, or that rotted, weathered porch step/porch swing giving out underneath both of their asses and sending them sprawling like dummkopfs tbh.

dummkopf activate! (and omg this prompt is gr8) i’m also using the ages given in absolution, since they make more sense. i like the idea of the seed brothers being way closer in age.

also catch me dodging the ‘how did they get here/when did this happen’ point like a professional. 

- - -

Summer was fading in the Whitetails, only appearing when the sun poured golden light through the ridges and trees, before giving way to fall in the blue shadows. The last few warm evenings were clinging to the season like trembling leaves on a branch. 

Rook was almost loathe to admit that they were enjoying their evening; it was the deep blue kind that turned pine trees black and made mists rise under their boughs. Fireflies flitted through the woods and hovered above the piles of rotten leaves and toppled logs, appearing to dance like golden constellations in flight. Idly, they sipped at their beer (some hipster-label IPA they found in the back of a gas station cooler) and used the heel of their boot to give a little extra push to the porch swing, causing it to creak mournfully on its rusted hooks. 

The part they should have loathed was that John Seed was their sole company. He took up the other end of the swing with a casual stretch of limbs, his legs stretched out and knees bending with the rhythm of the swing’s movements, an identical beer loosely held in one hand. His eyes were half-lidded, watching the fireflies with hazy interest. 

Fate or stupidity (or some combination of the two) had led up to that moment, but Rook wasn’t partial to dwelling on it any more than they had to. What mattered more was that John wasn’t howling mad or doing anything John-like. He almost came across like a regular person, relaxed and slightly buzzed off cheap, watery beer, enjoying one of the last hurrahs of summer with the air of a man on vacation. Once in awhile, he’d roll Rook a look like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for them to pull a pistol on him and finish things up neatly with a nice little bow on top for emphasis. And every time, he was met with them looking back at him with the same sort of summer-induced sleepiness. No man’s land was the term that came to mind, like the porch swing was a no-combat zone, for reasons beyond either of them. Maybe there was a little residual Bliss in the air.

Rook barely registered the soft hiss of a mosquito hitting the buzzing lamp beside them, but the sound seemed to induce something in John’s head, earning a soft, short laugh from him. When Rook looked at him in curiosity, he shrugged with a crooked smile.

“At my foster parents’ house–the first one–we had one of those lamps on the porch, and I used to count every time a mosquito ran into it. One of the farmhands even had one of those stupid tennis racket types, and I was allowed to take it and, I don’t know, declare war on them or something.” 

He talked about his past so sparingly, only allowing bits to come through when they were painful enough to relate to on a torture basis. It was strange to hear outside of that context, especially when it showed a little bit of what life was like for him and his brothers.

Then, he cleared his throat and his smile dropped slowly. “I don’t know why I brought that up,” he said, sounding like he was scolding himself for it. 

Rook indulged him with a smile over the top of their bottle before they took a sip from it. “It’s fine. I kind of like hearing about it,” they replied. It was honest, though. The moments where John seemed like a well-adjusted human being seemed few and far between, especially when his particular brand of mania kicked in. 

The smile that returned to his face came back faded; a secondhand, overwashed kind of smile. “You wouldn’t like to hear all of it, Deputy,” John said, his voice catching on each syllable in a sardonic downward descent. “Most of it isn’t pleasant.”

“I figured,” Rook replied, nudging the porch swing a little more. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool.”

They fell back into silence, but were surrounded by all the soft sounds of a dying summer; a symphony of crickets in the ferns, the gentle creak of old floorboards and rusty hinges, a night bird trilling in the pines. Then, John sipped his beer, cleared his throat, and kept his gaze steady on a pair of fireflies turning flickering spirals around each other. 

“You might not believe it, given your… rigid position on your opinions,” he said with all the measured carefulness that Rook was sure he learned as a lawyer. “But if I have to consider any memories you’d call ‘happy’, they’re all ones I have with my brothers.”

“I can believe it,” Rook replied. And they could; it wasn’t as if Joseph and Jacob Seed had been children fascinated with the idea of a murderous religious cult in the mountains of Montana. They were kids once. They must have done things that kids do, regardless of the nightmares brewing around them. John was no different.

John nodded, the drowsy expression coming back over him like a misty veil. “Jacob used to be the only one with a bike, and it had those pegs on it–” His brow furrowed, searching for the word. Then, he shrugged. “I don’t know. The ones you stand on. You know what I mean.”

Rook smiled behind the neck of their bottle and nodded.

“Sometimes he would let Joseph ride it, and I’d always get to stand on the pegs. Sometimes we could manage to get all three of us on the bike at once, which was probably really stupid. I’m surprised we didn’t fall off more.” He laughed softly, although it wasn’t much more than a soft sigh with a smile curled around it. Honestly, it was like talking to another person entirely, like Rook had been given a pass to see what John could have been like, before– 

Rook didn’t dwell on it. That was for a time and place that wasn’t then and there.

“There was a scrapyard about a mile and a half from our house that we used to ride to. No one ever supervised it, so we would just climb around like it was a playground. Everything was rusted and crumbling, but we didn’t actually know what tetanus was, so it didn’t matter. And there was this huge steel coil that had probably been there fifty years, and I’d hide in the middle of it, because kids don’t get killed like that or anything,” John said. The laugh that came after that was stronger, more authentic. “We each had a spot, actually. Joseph liked this steel girder that hung about six feet above the ground. He’d sit on the edge and watch us all the time. And Jacob’s was an old Volkswagen that he’d pretend to drive. Sometimes Joseph and I would get in the backseat and Jacob would say we were driving to Maine or Texas or wherever. We didn’t have family vacations, so that was about as close as we could get.”

His voice sounded so unguarded, and his expression matched suit. Nostalgia softened the cold, hardened edges of his face, making him look boyish, bringing warmth back into his eyes. As the evening turned deep ink-blue around them, he seemed to blend into it like he was part of the scenery.

Then, Rook watched him stiffen a bit, his shoulders rising as he let out a soft sigh through his nose. “That was a long time ago, though,” he said, like he was releasing that particular memory out into the wild. “I haven’t had many chances to make memories like that.”

Whatever terse, cold thing he meant to say next was interrupted by an odd, heavy creak from somewhere above their heads. There was a low cracking sound, and only a split second where Rook and John looked at each other before John’s end of the porch swing suddenly gave way, dumping both of them onto the rotten floorboards. All Rook registered was John’s yelp of surprise before they fell onto him, colliding hip to hip in a way that would certainly hurt in the morning. 

The only thing John had a chance to do was put out his other arm to keep Rook from rolling off the porch entirely, effectively locking the two of them in a half hug. Soaked in cheap beer and already aching, they looked at each other for a long moment before Rook broke up into hysterical laughter. It only took a moment before John followed suit, only to look at his other hand, holding his beer aloft, still half full. Rook followed his line of site before completely losing it, their forehead pressed against John’s shoulder as they laughed so hard that tears formed in their eyes.

“Oh thank God,” they said. “You saved the only thing that mattered.”

“My atonement paid off,” John affirmed with perfect solemnity, only for both of them to burst out laughing again. 

Tomorrow could have brought them to blows again, back on their cat and mouse chase through Hope County. But at that moment, if it were all to fall on a case of John making something like a good memory again, Rook figured it wasn’t a half bad start.