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tuesdayaddamss · 18 days ago

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who’s afraid of little old me; chibs telford.

part i. two fingers of jameson

summary: chibs sees what evil the butcher of belfast is capable of.

warnings: mentions of rape and abuse, language, jimmy o’ being a sleazy piece of shit.

word count: 3554

there’s a bar called jacob’s, nestled in charming’s most decrepit corner. it’s nowhere that they’ve frequented, but chibs still recognizes the address when it’s sent to him. he remembers having to pick up an embarrassingly inebriated juice from the same place last summer, when the boy was going through one of his spells, too blue, and humiliated, to drink in their company, in the privacy of their clubhouse.

the last time he’d been here, there were more heads than he’d bothered to count. all of them the nasty kind of drunks, those that lived with their necks stuck in the mouth of a bottle, too mean to brave the public. today, it’s damn near empty, not even a body to man the bar. just chibs and the butcher of belfast, jimmy fucking o’phelan, and the fools he’d brought along.

“sorry, love,” she sounds like she means it, chibs thinks, but he’s not to be trusted in matters that regard his wife. fiona’s an open wound, been bleeding for more than a decade now, and jimmy’s the one that keeps rubbing salt in the gash. he should’ve known what was waiting for him, who’d really summoned him here. fiona may have been the one to call, but the mad bastard was never without a hand in it.

he can only watch as a gunman leads her away with a hand on her elbow, her dark eyes looking over her shoulder, begging him for forgiveness that he’s already given. “sit with me,” that voice’s the same one that’s haunted his nightmares, and it’s a valiant effort not to bristle at the sound of it. but he sits anyway, because it wasn’t a request, and he knows it.

jimmy hadn’t changed an inch in twelve years, he realizes with no small bit of bitterness. he had hoped that time would be cruel to him, but he seems to be thriving, save for the exhaustion that lingers beneath his eyes. it’s the same face that had sneered down at him while he’d bled out on a street corner in a belfast slum. he wonders if he, himself, is even recognizable. he’s hardly the same man today, and he doesn’t look like him either.

“lennon!” he does bristle when his monster abruptly raises his voice, twisting around in his seat to find someone. chibs hadn’t noticed her at first, his vision having tunnelled at the sight of fiona and then reddened for jimmy, but he certainly sees her now, as if the irishman had thrust some spotlight upon her. young, too young for this place, and looking about as angry and miserable as he feels. “get the man a drink, for fuck’s sake. what am i payin’ you for?”

as soon as jimmy’s back is turned, the girl rolls her eyes, reminding chibs of a teenager pitching a fit. which, by the looks of her, might not be far off. she can’t be any more than eighteen, if that. “you’re not payin’ me,” this lennon retorts, her accent as thick as jimmy’s, and he’s impressed by her audacity. there are very few who dare to spit at the butcher like that. but, to chibs’s surprise, the grey-haired man merely scoffs at her.

she’s no IRA soldier. hell, she’s practically a babe. he doesn’t think he wants to know what she’s doing with the likes of jimmy. he sorely doubts that it’s of her own volition.

despite her attitude, she appears at the foot of the booth a moment later, a bottle in one hand and two glasses in the other. two fingers of jameson that he won’t touch set in front of him, and another that’s gone in seconds in front of jimmy. chibs prides himself on his observational skills, and it isn’t lost on him how she shies away from the man, her muscles tight and her head held low, without any of the bravado he’d initially picked up on. he imagined her an alley cat, stared down by a dog, back arched and hair on end.

her eyes, grey like the glasgow sky he’d grown up under, meet his for half of a second, and he nods. and then jimmy’s hand strikes her ass, none too gently, and she’s whirling on her heel to go before her keeper can even order it. chibs pretends not to notice her tilt her head back and pull straight from the bottle as she curls into another booth. cheers, he thinks grimly. if only the company was better.

“i’m not stateside for the sons,” jimmy starts, but he has only a portion of chibs’s attention. the rest of it is scattered in the winds. with jackie and his nomadic dream, stahl and her proposal, fiona and his kerrianne, and the thug standing behind him with a hand on his gun. “just came to close a distribution deal — i had no idea how muddled things had become.”

muddled was an understatement. jimmy’s boys had practically spat in the sons’ faces when they decided to sell guns to their enemies, the AB. the same bastards that had nearly killed him with a car bomb, who had been shoved so far up their asses that they couldn’t even digest in peace.

“edmond and cameron wouldn’t take a piss without your permission,” he retorts, the first time he had opened his mouth thus far. he thinks he hears the blonde girl snort, likely agreeing. no one in the true IRA went behind jimmy o’s back, and if they did, they very scarcely live to tell the tale.

“you see what happens if you give men some rope!” he agrees solemnly, as if they were on the same side. “shit only works when i handle it myself. and that’s my lesson here,”

“i want a sit-down with clay,” chibs doesn’t even bother to swallow down his scoff. the nerve of the mick bastard, asking him for anything after what he’d done, what he’d taken from him. he’d sooner cut off his own cock than help him.

“you expect me to recommend?”

“our bond with the sons runs deep,” too deep, if you asked him. chibs would be glad to wipe his hands of the cause. “your belfast charter has been our right hand since ‘87, best that we don’t jeopardize that.”

“i’m not your errand boy, jimmy.” his finger itches, the gun in his belt weighing heavily. he could do it, right here, right now. he’d die for it, and he knows that, but he’d be bringing him down with him. his wife, his daughter, god knows how many souls, would be freed. but then his brothers would be thrust into a war that they’re not ready for, and he’d be too busy rotting in the ground, like a coward, to help.

“aye, filip, you are.” the look in jimmy’s eye is as sharp as the knife he’d used to slit chibs’s face from ear to ear. “i banished you, took what’s yours. that’s the facts.”

chibs needs no reminder of what had been taken from him. of how he’d been thrust from ireland like trash to the landfill, of his three year old baby being ripped from his arms, his wedding band forcibly pulled from his finger while he lay bleeding. “you will do as i say.”

“go to hell,” he snarls, nearly regretting his words. he knows, maybe better than most, that this is not a man to piss off.

jimmy smiles, humming lightly, as he lifts his phone from the tabletop. dread pools in chibs’s gut. “have you seen any recent pictures of kerrianne?”

“she’s all fiona,” he feels ill, like he might hurl all over the leather seat, just like juice had months ago, though for a wholly different reason. not his bairn. please god, not his girl. “gorgeous. she’s reaching that magical change, yunno? tight little curves, breasts popping.”

he swallows back bile, grinding his teeth so hard that he swears he could feel enamel crack. “timley, really. fiona’s look’s fading — can hardly catch an edge any more.”

“and this one,” he turns to eye lennon lecherously, as if she were a piece of meat on a butcher’s table, speaking as if she could not hear. that poor, poor girl looked like a shell of a human being. her face numb, her arms wrapped around herself like armor. “she’s fun, pretty, but i’m afraid that she’s gotten loose over the years. she’s got a big goddamn mouth too. never shuts it unless it’s full.”

she flinches, and he has to pity her. at least fiona is treated like a wife, no matter how short her leash is, or how unwanted the love she gets. lennon, it seems, is no more than a pet. someone’s daughter, she is. he imagines his kerrianne in her shoes, jimmy paints that very picture for him, and he could cry.

“but kerrianne, the thoughts that enter my brain… impure. awful, i think.” he tuts mockingly, as if he was capable of empathy. and then he grins. “but then i remember that she’s not my daughter. so what’s the sin?”

“even if she does call me ‘da’.” and that’s it. sick, sociopathic, perverted son of a bitch. there’s a special corner of hell reserved for jimmy fucking o’phelan, and chibs cannot wait for the devil to get his hands on him. he’s tired of waiting. how long could he keep on praying to god for justice while that holy coward sits on his gilded throne and allows little girls like lennon to be raped and abused? allows innocents like kerrianne to be put in the que?

he lunges across the table, one hand fisted in the front of jimmy’s shirt, teeth bared like a rabid beast, heat searing his skin. the barrel of a gun presses against his throbbing temple, warning him, as jimmy jeers at his muscle to sit the fuck down and put it away. he knows, as well as he does, that chibs won’t kill him. not today. not while kerrianne is an ocean away, where he can’t protect her, while fiona can still pay the price of his heroism.

he lets him go, mourning the loss, longing for blood. “you set the meeting with clay, and we’ll work out this misunderstanding.” jimmy continues, as if nothing had happened. chibs can only imagine how many people threaten his life each day.

and then he waves him off, shooing him like he was a fly buzzing around his face. “walk him out, lennon.”

as much as chibs wishes that he could bash his smug face in, even if it’s just to regain some semblance of pride, he’s even more eager to get far away as fast as he can. he clambers to his feet without another word, spitting on jimmy’s loafers in a final show of defiance, before he storms past him and towards the doors, with the young blonde right behind him, the toes of her shoes nearly biting his heels.

he doesn’t expect any conversation from her, and he doesn’t know what he would even say. it’s not like she’d appreciate an “i’m sorry that your life sucks,” or that it would do her any good. he can’t help her, even if he wants to. he can’t even save his own wife and daughter from jimmy, let alone another’s, even if he wished to.

“mister telford,” to his surprise, she snags the hem of his kutte, effectively stopping him before he can make it to the van. her jaw’s clenched tight, eyes darting nervously over her shoulder as they come to standstill in the middle of the parking lot, his broad frame the only thing shielding her from any eyes that may be peering out of the building’s window. “kerrianne asked me to get this to you.”

she reaches into the cramped front pocket of her jeans, unveiling an unmarked envelope that’s been folded four times too many and stuffed into god knows how many odd places, the corners have begun to wear thin from being worried, but he regards it as if it contains the secrets of life. she shoves it into his calloused hand, her fingers icy against his palm, and he can only gawk at her.

he thinks, for a moment, that he might be hallucinating. perhaps he hasn’t given his head the time that it needs to heal, after all. maybe the explosion had caused worse damage to his brain than they’d diagnosed.

when he was excommunicated and banished, all those years ago, he’d been given very strict instructions. if he dared to seek out his family, if jimmy even suspected a lick of communication, he’d be buried alongside whoever had the gall to help him. it was a mercy that he was allowed to live in the first place, after all. he couldn’t risk the consequences of pushing his luck anymore.

for twelve years, he’s had nothing but memories and the picture he keeps in his wallet. nothing. and now, because of this girl, he has something. something from his kerrianne.

surely, she must’ve known how dire the consequences would’ve been if jimmy had caught her smuggling this overseas. if he happens to look outside now and sees her talking to him, even. she’d risked her life over a measly piece of paper, and chibs doesn’t know how he could even hope to express how much that means to him.

“thank you,” he croaks, clenching his jaw so hard that the bones creak. the words feel just as pathetic as they must sound. so he repeats them, as if that might augment them. “thank you.”

she nods jerkily, shoving her hands in her pockets as if her palms were glowing red. she turns on her heel, ready to scamper back to jimmy’s side, but chibs stops her.

“what he said,” he starts, unsure where he was going, but unable to simply ignore the elephant that’s looming over them.

“he’ll never touch kerrianne.” she interrupts sharply, her eyes burning beneath her pale fringe. “he was just tryin’ to get under your skin, to piss you off. he’d never. and if he did…”

she doesn’t finish that thought, but she doesn’t have to. the inferno is telling enough. he has to wonder just how well she knows his daughter — how deeply entangled she is with the butcher. lennon and kerrianne must be awfully close for the former to have risked her life just to get this letter to him. which means that she must spend time with her, she has to have been around for a long while.

over the years, he recalls jimmy saying. he does not want to think too hard about what that meant, in fear of hurling all over the lass.

the words ‘what about you?’ sit on the tip of his tongue, a gnarled hand tugging at the frayed strings of his heart. instead, he merely nods, because the longer she spends out here with him, the more trouble she’ll be in. she’s risked enough for him as is.

“thank you, lennon.” one more time, so that she knows. as if his gratitude — as if knowing that she’s done something good — might ease the hopelessness in her gaunt face. it doesn’t. alas, he tried.

he shoves the envelope into the pocket of his kutte as he watches her head back into jacob’s, praying to a deity he isn’t sure he believes in that it is not her death warrant.

“you good, brother?” chibs doesn’t hear the gravel crunching under jax’s pristine sneakers, he doesn’t notice him at all until he’s right beside him, the smoke of his pall mall billowing into his face. he’s so distracted that he almost forgets about the grudge he’s currently holding against his vice president.

he gingerly folds his daughter’s precious correspondence, returning it to the safety of his inner pocket. he’s lost track of how many times he’s read it now — enough that he has it memorized. every word, every smear made by an eraser, the funny way she loops her Ls. in three hours, it has become his scripture.

jax seems to take his silence as rejection, but he’s never been good at taking no for an answer. “what’s eating you?” he urges, as if he doesn’t have enough problems of his own right now. he’s a relentless piece of work, always has been. that would serve him well at the head of the table, if he wasn’t so prone to running from his problems. chibs would like to call him cowardly, but that’s not it.

“jimmy o’.” he says slowly, the name like acid on his tongue. “i saw him today. he used fi to lure me out.”

“yeah, tig told me. he wants to talk to clay, squash beef, right?” he frowns, his keen blue eyes burning a hole through chibs’s pocket, blatantly curious about the scrap of paper that he holds so dear. “what’d he do to piss you off? besides the obvious, of course.”

he scrubs a heavy hand over his scarred face, phantom pain blooming within the dead nerves. twelve years later, and it still feels like an open wound. the thought of lennon has haunted him all afternoon, the memory of her sneer, her misery, her battered youth, stuck in the still-healing cracks in his skull like chewing gum.

maybe he’s softening with age, maybe he understands horrors that the butcher is capable of too well to write the girl off, or maybe his heart is just a bloody thing, but he can’t, for the life of him, get her out of his head. it’s unfair, he thinks, for someone so young to be stuck where she is. he doesn’t know her, or her situation, but he’s not foolish enough to believe that she chooses to be shackled.

if she’d willingly subjected herself to a life with jimmy, she would not have defied him. that look he’d seen in her eyes was that of a prisoner; a caged animal, who’s gnawed at its bars until its maw was raw and bloody and its hope was snuffed out.

“there was a girl,” he may be angry with him, but there is no man that chibs trusts more than jax. he has always been the last, stubborn scrap of humanity in this club, clinging to them like rotting flesh on a carcass. “a kid, couldn’t have been more than eighteen. she was with him,”

it takes jax a moment to understand, his brows rising and eyes darkening all at once. “with him? like—?”

“aye. he said so himself. and it was quite clear that she didnae want to be anywhere near the bastard.” he considers telling him about the letter, about the risk she’d taken for him, but won’t. that’s the one thing that’s his, not theirs. he’s not willing to share this treasure with his family.

“shit,” jax breathes, chewing so hard on the butt of his cigarette that his teeth pierce the filter. “that’s… fuckin’ sick, bro.”

he can see the internal dilemma he’s battling now, the same one that chibs is grappling with. it’s not like they can do anything about it — jimmy’s too powerful, too protected. and if they tried to interfere, the relationship between the true IRA and the sons of anarchy would be blown to bits.

and the unfortunate truth is that it’s none of their goddamn business. lennon has nothing to do with them, with the sons, with their deal with jimmy. they have no right to put their noses in her business, no reason to be worried about her. they can pity her as much as they please, but it’s not their burden to carry.

but how can he stand idly by, knowing what he knows?

“whatever you’re thinkin’, don’t.” chibs looks up, away from his boots and back to jax, when he speaks. the younger man’s staring at him hard, frowning. “it’s sad, man, but this ain’t our fight.”

chibs scoffs, his hackles raising. without lennon here to defend herself, he felt the need to do so for her. he doesn’t care who she is, where she’d come from. no child deserves a life like hers — and jax, as a father himself, should feel the same, logic be damned. “she’s a kid. it’s more than sad, boyo.”

“last time you started a pissing contest with jimmy, he split your face open and banished you.” jax reminds him harshly, as if he could ever forget. “and that, to him, was merciful. i understand that you wanna help this girl, but you don’t know anything about it. there might be a helluva lot more to the story than whatever you got.”

there’s nothing that could excuse what jimmy’s done, is doing, to lennon. but he thinks that jax knows that, that he’s grasping at straws in an effort to ease the weight.

“don’t go chasing ghosts, brother.” that’s exactly what she is, really. a ghost. no voice, no ties, no prominence. just a face he’ll never forget and a feeling he cannot shake. jax stares at him expectantly, brows raised. “okay?”

chibs kisses his teeth, fingers worrying the edge of kerrianne’s letter in his pocket. “aye. okay.”

but the thing about ghosts is that they have a tendency to haunt.