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TUCKER

“H ey Doc.” I slid into the chair across from Silas.

“Hand,” he said, rifling through his drawer and pulling out his glasses. He looked so much older with them on, but he never wore them outside his office. I set my bruised hand on the table and looked around his office. The walls were bare as always except for his degree and a photo of him and Mrs. Shore.

“Did you ice it yesterday?” He asked me and I nodded, I did for a bit, but I got a little distracted by the whole Josh-in-my-lap moment. “Are you lying to me?” He looked up from my hand and narrowed his grey on me.

“Not for long,” I admitted. “Are you lying to me ?” I asked after a beat of silence.

Silas looked up from my hand again, this time his expression was puzzled but defensive. “About what, Tucker?” he challenged with his eyebrow raised. It was apparent that he didn’t have the patience to deal with my shit today but I was going to lay it out anyways.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone you and Josh were brothers?” I asked, not cutting corners.

“He told you,” Silas said as he set my hand down, he rose from his chair and wandered across his office to the cupboards. He pulled out a box and brought disinfectant, and a wrap back to the desk.

“Everything,” I said as Silas popped the cap on the bottle, pressing the opening to a cloth with a tight jaw.

“You did it,” Silas smiled when he looked up at me, but that only led to further confusion. “You figured out what he needed.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I chuckled, but it felt good to have the effort recognized.

“He threatened to burn down my house when I suggested we tell my mother that we know, I told her anyway, you should have seen that fight,” Silas said, swallowing tightly. “If he told you out of his own free will… It's a step in the right direction.

“It wasn’t necessarily out of his own free will,” I sighed.

“What does that mean?” He asked.

“It means we went to Lorette, his mom called him, and he needed a ride, so I took him. She’s…” I trailed off, the pit in my stomach growing with every passing moment, thinking about that lock on his room.

“A monster,” Silas finished for me. “She’s sick. I know that much. I remember the day I showed up there to help him, she thought I was there for her. She gave me a list of prices before the door had even fully opened.”

“Have you been inside?” I asked him.

“Josh stopped me before I could get inside,” Silas sighed, the grey hair was more prominent in his exhausted state, like he had aged ten years from the mention of her.

“There’s a lock…locks…” I said, counting them in my head. “On the outside of his old bedroom door. And scratch marks,” I said, my voice getting quiet. “She locked him in there.”

“Are you sure?” He asked me and I nodded.

“She really messed him up.” I looked up from the table and met Silas’ grey stare.

“He’s good at hiding it with his anger, but he’s…”

“Yeah, I only know the pieces I was able to string together through my father’s transactions,” Silas said.

“She still loves him, you know, your father. It seems like that’s why she resents Josh so much, because she thinks he ruined it for her.” My voice cracked at the thought of anyone treating Josh in such a disgusting way.

“She was sick, Dean. Really sick. She still is. I can’t change the mistakes my father made. I can’t rewrite the past to save him from what he is today, but I’ll work harder to give him the life he was meant to have,” Silas said, and I believed him. “Bringing him here was a fight. He would have rather gone anywhere else.”

“But after Ian,” I said with a sigh.

“He told you everything about Ian?” Silas leaned forward.

“He told me the truth about Ian,” I corrected him. “He attacked him, he…” I paused, unsure if it was even something I should be sharing, but I needed Silas’s help. “Ian raped Josh that day in the showers, it’s why he fought back so hard. That's why he nearly killed him.”

“Fuck.” Silas slumped back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair. “I knew it was bad, that Ian had done something…he told me and the council it was just a fight, that Ian pushed him too far and the two went at it.”

“Did anyone look at Josh after the fight? Did he go to the hospital?” I asked Silas who seemed caught off guard from the question. He rose from his desk to his filing cabinet and tugged it open in silence, digging through it until he pulled out a light blue folder. He flipped through it, each passing moment the lack of noise ate at my resolve.

“He did,” Silas finally said. “The Lorette team reported a few bruises, cuts, but nothing serious. But in his file, a week before the fight, there’s something that was added to his file. It's in a different pen…” Silas grumbled under his breath. “It says he suffered a concussion in practice when he was struck by a ball.”

He pushed me, I hit the shower wall and when I woke up…

“It wasn’t a ball,” I said. “He told me Ian shoved him and he hit his head on the tiles.” He’s got a scar,” I said, lifting my other hand to my eyebrow. "It’s fresh, still pink. It can only be a few months old at most.”

“Lorette is covering for Ian.” Silas slammed the drawer closed and threw Josh’s folder on his desk sending the papers scattering across. His school picture stared up at me from the desk, he was still sporting a dark bruise under his right eye from the fight and his eyes were so dark that the iris were lost in a sea of black.

“That’s why you attacked him,” Silas said, leaning over the table to look me in the eye. “What did Ian say to you?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I shook my head.

“Everything matters now, every single detail. We aren’t going to get rid of him unless I know exactly what happened, to you, to Josh.” Silas’s arms flexed tightly; he was trying not to get worked up, but I could see it all over his face.

“Josh was alright lying that day. What makes you think he’ll help now?” I asked him.

“You,” Silas said plainly and looked up at me. “What did Ian say to you?”

I contemplated lying, but all I wanted to do was get Josh free of this. "He said that Logan’s favorite date spot was the shower room,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking, I just… I swung.”

“You didn’t hit him hard enough,” Silas said instantly as he sank into his chair again, his shoulders relaxing a touch.

“What do we do now?” I asked Silas, trying not to smile at his quiet pride for my out-of-character moment of violence.

“If I take this to the committee again. The proof is clear if I can get photos of the scar, combined with the tampered medical records. The problem is I need Josh to testify,” Silas explained. “It’s going to be a pain in the ass anyways because coming back months later with new information and a changed story. They probably won’t believe him—not this long after, not with the story changed.”

“I don’t want to put him through that,” I said. I can’t, I won’t. That searing hot wave of protectiveness washed up over my chest, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I just had to let it pull me below the surface.

“If we don’t, Ian just gets to go on, he’ll be back on the field by season end… You can’t fight him every time he makes a sleazy remark,” Silas said.

“I can try,” I argued, but he wasn’t impressed by that. “This, combined with your family secret, it’s too much. We just got him working with the team… it’ll disrupt everything.”

“I wanted to go to my Grandfather, to deal with it directly before the news gets wind of it,” he said. “It’s going to blow up in our faces if they find it.”

“Vultures,” I agreed with him.

“Exactly, but Josh is confident he can keep it quiet until the season is over,” Silas said, I hissed as he pressed the cloth to the open cuts embedded between my knuckles. “Don’t hit people if you can’t handle antiseptic, Tucker,” he grumbled.

“Doc, you and I both know that he can’t keep it quiet, not now…” I ground my teeth together in frustration. “They’re going to dig now, for anything they can find. I shut them down too hard…if anything comes out. It’ll be my fault,” I said with a grimace as he cleaned another cut.

“You’re stupid, Golden Boy, but you aren’t that stupid,” Silas groaned and pulled off his glasses.

“They don’t have a story anymore, Silas,” I said, deliberately using his real name. He huffed out a frustrated sigh, but it meant that I was serious; this wasn’t a joke to me. “I was their story, gay captain destroys winning team .” I winced as he wrapped my hand tightly in the bandage.

“You still have time to chase all those dreams—if you don’t lose focus on what’s really important,” he warned. “Entertaining the idea that if the story breaks on Josh and my family, it’s your fault because they didn’t have a better story is stupid, it's a notion. It’s your anxiety talking, you’re stacking a bunch of ‘what ifs’ and preparing for a war that might not come.”

“And if it does?” I questioned. "What then?”

“Can I ask you a question?” Silas said, and I nodded. “Are you sure about this?” He asked me after a long moment.

“About what?” I asked, the confusion palpable.

“It wasn’t your fault that day,” he said. "I know that you think Cael getting in that car, reaching that point, was something you did in your relationship. But he was a ticking time bomb.”

“Yeah, and I lit the fuse,” I scoffed.

“Maybe you did, maybe it was already lit… Josh is a different kind of doomsday clock Dean, just make sure that you’re ready for it when the time comes because Cael had everyone to fall back on. Josh has no one.” He looked at me, really wanting what he had just said to sink in.

“Josh has me,” I said without missing a beat.

A small smile crept over his lips, nodding once. “Alright, then we handle it.”

“Together,” I said.

Silas tapped his fingers to his chest gently.

“Two steps at a time.”