~*~
He’s at his mother-in-law’s house for almost two hours before he sees Chase. First, he shuffles off to shower, rest, and eat, then the uncles want his attention, and the cousins clamor for it. He drinks it up, the big, loud family he doesn’t see often but adores. It’s easy, getting swept up in them, in letting himself pretend for a moment that he’s here without Nora.
That lasts until he walks into the backyard and sees Chase, dancing through martial arts forms.
Immediately, John notices he’s thinner than when he first left to come here, thinner and pale with an almost sickly cast to his features. But it’s the way he’s left in a circle of isolation, carefully avoided, that really drags John’s attention to him.
Granny’s home is marked by a lack of space, by the family living on top of each other, so deeply in each other’s pockets that boundaries are blurry at best. The cousins sleep piled in beds and on couches, curled together like puppies, and they spend the days the same way, a knot of always moving limbs and high voices and flashing smiles that can’t be separated into individuals.
Chase stands apart, separate, solitary. Quiet and still and alone.
He looks, John realizes with a start, like he had those first few months after Nora died, when his son was a ghost haunting an empty house, a shell of himself.
“Go,” Granny says abruptly, and John gives her a pained look. She softens a little, presses a bottle of water and a paper towel wrapped sandwich into his hands and nods at the boy again. “Go to him.”
John goes.
The cousins have run off, the sound of them distant shrieks of laughter, so John knows damn well Chase is aware of his approach, but he doesn’t react, just glides through his forms with a smoothness he doesn’t recognize in Chase, a liquid kind of grace that reminds him of—
Reid.
His mouth tightens, but for the first time, he wonders if he didn’t get something very wrong.
Chase comes to a slow stop and finally gives his father his attention. He stares, blank and unblinking, as John offers him the sandwich.
“I’ve missed you,” John says and Chase’s lips twist into a smirk. “You look—it’s good, your exercise.”
“Krav Maga,” Chase fills in, and John nods. Something dark flares in his son’s eyes for a moment. “Tyler taught me.”
John goes still.
The first instinctive anger isn’t what Chase needs. And he’s beginning to think that maybe—maybe—he was wrong. Maybe he should have listened to Chase about Reid.
“Why?” he asks, keeping his voice quiet, undemanding and without anger. Chase shrugs and looks away, a private smile playing on his lips.
It’s the first one he’s seen from Chase in two months, since he ran away and Reid brought him home. And it’s not for him. It’s a smile that belongs to the memory of Tyler.
“He said it’s a good way to get out my anger and aggression without getting into fights.” Chase gives him a mocking sort of smirk as he balls up his paper towel and crusts, then heads back to the house.
~*~
“You can’t leave him here, John. He’s miserable.”
“He’ll be miserable at home, too,” John protests.
Granny stares at him, her eyes narrow, shrewd and knowing. “Not if you stop hiding from him. Whatever it is that you did to piss off Chase—you can fix it, but not if he’s here and you’re there.”
He looks at Chase, sitting on the porch swing with a notebook he scribbles furiously in. He’s alone, the way he always is.
“Yeah,” he concedes with a sigh. “Ok.”
~*~
Finding Tyler Reid is difficult. It’s strange, because he seemed to be in endless supply while Chase was in Washington, a too constant presence that reminded John of his son and why he’d sent him away.
It takes almost a week, a long week of Chase sitting silently in the station, immersed in comics and his sketching, a week of watching him exercise in the backyard and jog around the neighborhood. It’s a week of living with a silent son who doesn’t even bother glaring at him—he just ignores John with a pointedness that makes him ache.
In the end, he doesn’t find Reid—Reid finds him. He approaches his cruiser as he’s picking up dinner for him and Chase.
“Why—why is he back? You said the summer.”
There’s something in Reid’s eyes that makes the decision for John.
He’s a cop. He’s spent twenty years trusting evidence, long enough to know that sometimes—sometimes the evidence is wrong. Sometimes you listen to your instinct and gamble.
“Because he was miserable. Being there isn’t what he needs.”
Reid looks away, gets a visible grip on himself, and John says, “He’s been miserable since I dragged him away from you, Reid. And I’m starting to wonder if maybe that’s something I need to pay attention to.”
He’s so tense, like strung wire ready to snap. “What are you going to do?”
John sighs.
~*~
He shifts in his seat as Dad turns the cruiser off the main road, driving into the forest. He glances at his father, but doesn’t ask—because if he’s wrong, if they aren’t going to the house in the woods, he doesn't want to know.
He wants to believe for a few minutes that Tyler and Lucas are waiting at the end of this winding road through the trees.
When Dad turns again, onto a smaller, overgrown drive Chase knows too well, he lurches in his seat, scrambling for the handle and Dad reaches out, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“Wait for me to park, son,” he says, mildly exasperated.
Chase shivers and twitches, and as soon as the cruiser stops, he’s bursting out, almost falling in his scramble.
Tyler is there, and Lucas, and they are so real he wants to cry. He makes an abortive half step toward Tyler and then stills, glancing at his Dad.
Unfair accusations ring in his head, too recent and dirty wrong no to dismiss, and it keeps
