the Sprawl

“I’ve never been camping,” Jack said.

In retrospect, it was not a benign statement. But in the moment, he’d thought that it was just another fact.

He hadn’t been camping. He hadn’t taken Matt camping. His dad—useless dipshit that he was—had sent Bill to camp and then sent Tom out to the neighbors’ to camp, but had tossed his hands up at kid three and written off the rest of them to city life and city life only.

The closest Jack had been to camping was sleeping outside when home was too daunting to go back to in the evening. He’d slept on a few friends’ floors and couches and fire escapes in his time. He’d slept on the odd roof or wall if it was comfortable enough and he was tired enough. Grace had found him knocked out under her window once while he waited for her to escape her mama’s shrieking pretty soon after she’d left the convent.

She stood over him and claimed he’d damn near given her a heart attack. She made him swear not to do that again.

He promised he wouldn’t.

But when they got their own apartment and had a baby on the way, he might have fallen asleep in the kitchen once or twice.

Or, you know. Two or three times a week.

It became something of a habit and it drove Grace right up the wall. She’d gestured insistently at the pillow fortress-nest that she’d amassed in the bedroom every time she woke him up and asked him why the fuck he thought she’d gone through all the trouble of building it.

The wrong answer was ‘for the baby?’

The right answer was ‘for our family.’

It was maybe a little poetic or something that, after nine months of sleeping at the kitchen table waiting for the baby to come home, Matty used to fall asleep at the table waiting for Jack to duck through the door after work all those years later.

Matt still slept at the table if people didn’t have an eye on him.

He, like his mother, had a nesting impulse, which meant that he was very meticulous about all the linens and pillows and shit he piled on his bed. But apparently, the nesting impulse had crashed into Jack’s sleep disorder somewhere along the line in Matty’s DNA and the result was Matt being highly selective, borderline territorial, about his sleeping quarters and devil-may-care about where the fuck he actually conked out.

When he’d been a little one, Jack had had a more or less easy time carrying him back to bed.

Age made Matty about six thousand times more stubborn.

He would not be moved.

Jack tried to gather him up from when he’d knocked out on the kitchen bar once and that sleep disorder switch flicked on like a fuckin’ generator.

Matt stretched arms out and dug fingers in and glued himself to that goddamn bar. He then had the audacity to snuffle into the tile like it was his plump silk pillow.

Jack did not understand.

But then again, he’d never understood a lot about Matt and meeting him as a grown-up with the capacity to explain some of the weirder behaviors had done little to clear most of them up.

“Don’t like them,” grown-up Matt hissed in the direction of oranges.

Which was crazy-talk because this was the same guy who’d take a fucking bite out of a whole, unpeeled lemon or lime without batting an eye.

“Too sweet?” Jack tried.

Matt wrinkled his nose.

“They taste like murder,” he murmured.

“The pith?” Jack offered.

“No,” Matt said.

And that was that. Discussion had, accomplished, and complete.

His kid remained one of them Rubik’s cubes. A twenty-sided one full of dark matter and secrets.

It made Jack a little teary sometimes just how much Matty was like his mama.

Matt, however, it seemed, had finally found something that he’d decided that he liked completely and totally, all the way through. And that was being unleashed upon nature. And, like with the oranges, Jack just didn’t get it.

“Baby, we’re city folk,” he told Matt after Foggy had announced that he would not stand for the travesty which was Jack’s lack of camping experience and had set forth to put plans in motion to rectify this.

Matt blinked and made his signature, ‘do I fucking care?’ face. It was answer enough, but Jack, because he had nothing better to do, put a little more pressure on the point.

“We don’t need to camp—I certainly don’t need to camp,” he said.

Matt jutted a lip out at him.

“But there’s trees,” he said.

Oh, right. Of course, how had Jack forgotten? There were tall things in the world which needed climbing, which were not available to Matt in Hell’s Kitchen.

“Alright, so we can go to Central Park,” he attempted to negotiate.

“Dad,” Matt said flatly. “We’re going camping. You’re going to like it. Chill.”

But like.

Why, though?

Jack realized about an hour later that he was maybe being a little petulant about this. Matt was excited. Tuesday was excited that Matt was excited. That was two out of three, surely that was enough to swallow down the grumpiness and just give in to the general air of excitement, right?

Right.

They were going camping. And Jack was going to like it.

So help him God.

“But why?” Grace asked the next day over lunch. There were several sets of eyes peeking at them from around the corner of the patio, but Jack was used to all the kids in the orphanage glaring at him at this point.

They didn’t trust him with their beloved Sister Maggie, no matter how many times he brought her lunch, and that was sweet. It was good to know there was a small army of under-18s looking out for Grace when he wasn’t there.

“Apparently it was on my bucket list,” he said with a shrug.

“Was it really?” Grace asked, incredulous.

He’d brought her a sandwich with a peach for lunch. Wheat bread, ham, mayo, mustard, and bread and butter pickles. He’d made one with tomato and lettuce once when they were dating and the silent judgment that wafted off her as she’d picked the offending veg off of it had stayed with him ever since. He watched her carefully move around pickles as he tried to figure out if camping really was a thing that he’d ever cared about doing.

“Bill got to go camping,” he said. “Always told me it was good for the soul.”

“Bill murdered his step-daughter,” Grace pointed out.

Fair.

“You ever been camping?” he asked.

“No,” Grace said. She took a bite of sandwich. He followed suit.

They sat in the silence for a minute, chewing.

“You think I should look it up?” Jack finally asked.

Grace shrugged.

“Got anything better to do?”

No, not really.

Camping looked…hard.

There were a lot of moving parts if Jack was reading all these websites right.

There was a tent involved, which he’d figured from the start, but there were a whole lot of videos online about how to set up a tent. In fact, there seemed to be infinite ways to set up a tent.

How did you know which one you needed? Was there like, a couple ways that you just had to know? Was this information people learned when they went off to camp for a week as kids?

If so, Jack was seriously fucked here. And Matt was fucked by proxy—unless Foggy had, in his constant, patient crusade to do the Lord’s work, taught Matt these skills in Jack’s absence.

Just the tent was confounding enough, but worse yet was the load of folks who had very kindly compiled list after list of all the shit that needed to be stuffed into bags and brought along with the tent in order for camping to happen as it was supposed to.

Jack had gotten knocked out in the ring once and when he woke up, Rudy had informed him that half the gym had camped out in the main room to make sure he wasn’t dead.

That camping trip had involved, at maximum, a gym bag and a pair of gloves for all parties.

These lists were overkill, if Jack had anything to say about it.

But then again, Jack was an idiot with a highschool diploma and even that, just barely. He did, however, know someone who was less of an idiot and who’s highschool diploma had come to them with barely any work at all.

“You’re going what now?” Vanessa asked with skepticism dripping from her tone.

“Camping,” Jack told her and her arched eyebrow.

“Dude,” she said. “That’s totally not your backstory.”

“I know,” Jack said, “But Matt’s so excited about it—what else am I supposed to do?”

Vanessa squinted over Jack’s shoulder while she thought about it and then her eyes popped open all the way.

“I got exactly what you need,” she said.

Jack had met Wade. He was aware of Wade. Vanessa talked of no one the way she talked about Wade. And, bless her, those rose-tinted glasses had to be an inch thick at the least.

Wade Wilson was kind of a dick. In a good way. In a chill way.

Wade did nothing that he didn’t want to do and everything that he did. His brain was a one-way sieve with a Vanessa-shaped indentation in it.

He was also apparently Canadian, a vet, and a professional camper.

“Dear god, why?” Wade groaned upon learning of Matt and Co.’s intentions for Jack.

“I guess I need to do it,” Jack shrugged.

“I mean, probably,” Wade said. He was feeding a black and white cat pieces of what appeared to be turkey right from the pack.

“Babe,” Vanessa said, “Just like, pretend it’s your first time and tell Jack the top five most important things.”

Wade had severe scarring on his face and hands. He had no eyebrows, but that didn’t stop him from making the whole range of human expression. He hopped through emptiness, annoyance, thoughtfulness, and, that most important of all expressions, ‘ehn. Whatever.’

“Don’t leave food out,” he said. “Google what poison ivy looks like—if you touch it, do not touch your face. Stay on the trail. Bring hand sanitizer. And mosquito repellant. And a hat. And water. Foil. Matches. And a fuckin’ harness for your kid—he’s an animal.”

Uh.

Right.

“Just follow Karen’s lead, she’s a forest child,” Wade said.

Jack actually? Felt relief? From that.

“Thanks?” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” Wade said. “But also, I dunno. Just have fun or something? I really dunno, man. I’ve never camped for fun.”

That was a little sad.

“You want to join us?” he asked. “I’m sure Foggy won’t mind.” He looked at Ness. “Is camping fun for you?”

Vanessa frowned in thought and looked back at Wade.

“Is camping fun for us?” she asked.

“No clue, babes,” Wade said.

“Do you want to go camping?” she asked.

Wade shrugged his shoulders. Vanessa hummed and turned back to Jack.

“Let us think about it,” she said. “We’ll get back to you tonight.”

Matt was excited at the prospect of having Wade around to harass on this camping trip. He called him and agitated him for nearly an entire hour before the poor guy gave in and said ‘fine, we’ll fucking go already, Jesus fucking Christ.’

Foggy was pleased. Jack suspected sometimes that he allowed Matt to do his bidding.

That was probably fine.

Foggy’s bidding was certainly safer than most of the other shit Matt spent his time banging his head against. It was almost wholesome even.

This meant, however, that Jack and Vanessa, two people who had exactly half of a camping trip’s experience between them, were now in charge of coordinating shit and fetching stuff on lists that Foggy and Wade just seemed to have in their heads.

They both had to request written copies and both got baffled faces in response before lists were extracted from the respective brains with almost patronizing indulgence.

Jack had the added struggle of Matt trying to steal and open shit which did not need to be stolen or opened yet. The mosquito-repelling citrus candles, for example. Matt was way into those. And so they were hidden under a bag of marshmallows which Matt was disgusted with.

They all needed to bring knives for cooking, but the knives that Matt produced and insisted they take with them did not appear to be food-safe knives.

They were the wrong shapes entirely.

Some of them looked kind of medieval.

That turned into a conversation about where the fuck these things had come from.

And that turned into another conversation about the true extent of all the weapons Matt was alarmingly well-trained in using.

He just didn’t like them as much as he liked his red clubs, he explained over the pile of sharps Jack had forced him to produce from the recesses of the apartment. He kept toying with their edges like a kid who was in trouble but still really wanted to play.

They hadn’t even gotten to the camping part of this adventure and Jack was anxious and exhausted.

Nelson, Murdock & Page closed the office early on Friday.

Matt came home and practically crawled into Jack’s lap, he was so impatient. Jack let him wriggle in under his arm. He wasn’t done researching yet. There were still two billion videos he needed to watch to have even a chance in hell at knowing what he was doing.

Matt, however, was heavy. And Tuesday, who had been released from her harness, wanted to be wherever he was, up to and including Jack’s lap.

The two of them were really shit for getting things done around here.

This was exactly why Jack had never gotten Matt a dog.

Once the tail had been removed from his face and his son had been deposited where he belonged (on the floor) Jack submitted to the ordeal of being ready to camp.

The crowd went wild.

Wade was displeased at the thought of camping, mostly, Vanessa told Jack, because his version of camping usually included being under fire at some point in the night. He also had a less than beneficial relationship with most wildlife.

“There’s a fuckin’ reason I left Canada,” Wade grumbled.

“War,” Matt said.

“Besides war,” Wade said, rolling his eyes.

“Emotional abuse,” Matt said.

“Redthew, do I seem like I’m in the mood to be playing braingames with you right now?”

“Raccoons.”

“Better.”

Wade was good at three things, Jack quickly came to understand.

1. Adoring and cherishing Vanessa at every possible opportunity.

The man was in-fucking-credible at that.

2. Camping.

Wade was very, very good at camping. He could set up a tent with no instructions. He could make a fire in five minutes.

The guy was virtually unstoppable, although he and Karen had a competition going for the better, most prepared wilderness explorer.

Karen was similarly unstoppable, but with bluer eyes and more hair. She taught Jack how to pick poison ivy out of the brush and to steer Matt away from it, since he showed not even a little interest or care in avoiding it himself.

The third and final thing Wade was really good at made Jack’s chest feel too small for his heart. It made his diaphragm twist and his stomach squeeze a little.

Because Wade was really, really good at being a big brother to Matt.

He had a fist in the back of Matt’s hoodie every ten minutes or so and yanked him off to go harass someone or something else in the opposite direction when he approached something un-Matt-friendly. He herded Matt when they went for a walk—or a hike, rather. That’s what camping-people apparently called walks—and riled up the dog so that she’d step on Matt’s heels when he got especially annoying or a little too bold.

Matt hissed and spit at Wade and generally considered him a cramp to his style and a real wet blanket in the fun department here, but he let Wade guide him through especially tricky terrain and he didn’t wave Wade off in frustration when the climbing roots and rocks started up the way he flapped at Foggy and Jack.

Matt didn’t want their help. He wanted to figure out how to do this his own way, even though he had limited resources to do that.

Wade was better at describing terrain than Foggy or Jack or Karen and he eventually circled back from the front of the group to tell Matt that they were going to play Wilderness Simon Says.

Wade had Matt track his movements and copy them, so that Matt could find the footholds in the dirt faster than it took him to find them with his stick.

Matt, naturally, was ace at Simon Says. And he was stoked to be able to more or less keep up with everyone else.

Jack had to swallow hard so as not to cry at the thought that Matt had found someone who was happy to be his friend and come up with ways to make him feel like he was included in the group as an equal.

Vanessa caught him in the act of this feelings business and punched him in the arm, so you know.

That helped.

Matt also got a little bold and slipped right off the edge of the stream they were poking around. Tuesday panicked and leapt into the water after him.

She ‘rescued’ him. From two-foot deep water, yeah, but you know what? It counted.

Matt was cold, wet, and still far, far too amped for Jack to deal with at the minute.

When he was little, the overspill of enthusiasm could be scraped off by letting Matt loose on a blanket in the living room or wrapping him up in the same blanket and letting him prove himself smarter than a dog. When he’d gotten too big for these things to scratch that itch, Jack had found books and Legos to be a pretty good substitute.

And when all that failed, nothing could really beat throwing the kid at a plot of grass and telling him to go nuts.

They’d practically lived at the park before Matt had gone blind, and even after, one of Matt’s safe and comforting places was the park and so they’d been working on relearning how to navigate that expanse of green right before Jack had opted to go meet his maker.

He was aware that now, Matt’s way of coping with his energy was to either go beat the shit out of a bag or a person, or to go make bad decisions with one of his many long standing bad-decision-making friends.

These included, but were not limited to: Karen, a dark-haired, walking attitude problem called Jessica, a very lovely, but no less troublesome woman called Jennifer, a buddy called Danny, their pal called Luke, a woman who Matt called his evil twin whose name was, in actuality, Elektra, and Maria’s husband Frank.

Well.

Jack wasn’t so sure Matt and Frank were friends so much as nemeses. ‘Nemeses,’ Matt had explained, because ‘enemies’ suggested that there was a power differential here, in addition to unmitigated antipathy.

Once Matt had dumbed that shit down enough that Jack could understand what the fuck he was trying to say, it had boiled down to ‘Frank’s fucking stupid, but if he wasn’t a mass murdering fuckhead, we’d probably be friends and also he’s funny when he’s mad at me.’ With a healthy mix of ‘we actually have a lot in common and if someone ever tried to kill him without a damn good reason, I’d break them in half with my bare hands’ on the side.

Frank, according to Maria, did not reciprocate these feelings in so many words. Rather, Maria said, he called Matt ‘Red,’ and only Red, and apparently, Frank only gave nicknames to people he considered at least marginally likable.

Otherwise he called people by their full names or last names only like some kind of drill sergeant.

Frank refused to come camping because he was permanently camping.

Jack was fine with that.

Jack, for whatever reason, could not make himself like Frank.

Jack kind of wanted to fuck with Frank until he took a swing. Which was bad, bad, bad.

It had been literal decades since he’d felt that urge, that tension, that heat—the pull to goad.

In the last couple of years of his career, the goal had been to get back up. Go down and get back up. The thing that roiled around high in his chest hadn’t been doing a whole lot of wriggling or squirming back then, the way it had for the first eight or so years he’d been in the ring.

His mother-in-law—god rest her fucking soul— had called it a devil. A more technically honed version of the thing screamed out of Matt.

The thing that oozed out of Jack was slimier. Grittier. When he imagined it, it looked like a figure dripping with clotting blood.

It was interested in Frank—had been since Frank had admitted to twisting Matt’s elbow out of place.

It was like the damn thing had been given a shot of adrenaline.

So he was glad, quietly, that Frank and Maria hadn’t joined them.

By the time they got back to camp, Matt had fallen into enough streams and slipped down enough rocks and alarmed the dog so thoroughly that he was more or less back on the same playing field energy-wise as everyone else, although Vanessa had discovered, to Jack’s exhaustion and complete lack of surprise, that Matt would do anything if it started the with the phrase ‘I dare you.’

The two of them were now seeing how much shit their could hide in the sleeves of their jackets.

It was a good distraction while everyone else moseyed around, slowly getting things together for dinner. Tuesday followed Foggy around quietly and, when he settled down to scrub the little grill they’d brought along, came over to Jack to escape the sound of the steel wool scraping against metal.

He gave her pets and rubs and they had a good bonding session before Karen emerged from the blue tent, bleary-eyed and bushy tailed from a nap and declared that she was now fit for kindling gathering. Wade told her that she was not and she told him to go fuck himself.

Matt and Vanessa, bored of their arm-stuffing contest already, had graduated to Vanessa trying to get Matt to guess which cards she was holding up.

They both lit up at the prospect of doing anything which was not sitting.

Wade evaluated that and told Karen that he’d thought it through and would be taking her advice to go fuck himself so that she could lead the kindling expedition.

Wade was a smart man.

Karen surveyed her help and said, “Okay, we can do this,” in a tone which sounded a little like a pep-talk to herself.

Jack stayed back with Foggy, Wade, and the dog to watch those three go crunch through the underbrush.

“Vanessa’s got chaotic Matt-energy,” Foggy observed in Wade’s direction.

“You don’t gotta rub it in,” Wade sighed.

So.

It turned out that Matt and Wade had had a thing.

Yeah.

That kind of thing.

Jack wasn’t sure how he felt about that. A little weird for sure, but given that Ness had been just as dead as he had been and given that Wade was, generally speaking, very good with Matt, he decided that he would look past it.

“Man, don’t even trip,” Wade said, “It was super casual at best. Just fucking around until Nelson here decided to take the plunge.”

Foggy didn’t seem to mind.

Well, if Foggy didn’t mind, then it was okay.

The Kindling Team returned covered in pine needles and twigs.

Matt had a handful of viable kindling which he had very proudly dug right out of the dirt without anyone’s guidance or supervision.

Half of this handful had been disposed of since it was covered in ants.

This meant, of course, that Matt had been covered in ants and he had the welts to prove it.

Karen looked a little harried. Vanessa, however, was one giant toothy grin as she shoved into Wade’s arms a load of sticks of various sizes.

Hers, she said, had no ants—only termites. So take that, pretty boy.

Matt pointed out that his had a spider in them.

Foggy banished them both to fervent handwashing.

Jack wasn’t sure which part of this camping thing he was supposed to be enjoying.

The walk-hike had been alright, although he’d spent most of it having emotions and anxiety over his danger-prone child. The whole setting up part had been fine. The time to wait between kindling-excursions equally sufficient.

Really, the best part so far was sitting around, playing with the dog.

“I mean, that’s mostly it,” Wade told him, offering a beer his way. “You’re living it, man.”

He’d rather go to a bar with his buds.

“Fucking same,” Wade said with his own beer bottle raised. “Fucking same.”

Camping really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Matty was having a good time, though. So that was something. He was listening for bugs at the minute, hunkered down in the hermit’s hovel he and Vanessa had built out of branches and twigs. They’d hunted down a scrap of cardboard and named the hovel ‘the Blanket Fort’ and they’d decided that’s where they were sleeping tonight to get the full camping experience. No one could do anything to stop them. No one tried, but the spirit of protest hung around the den anyways.

Foggy and Karen were chatting, saying that all good camp food needed to be slightly burnt. But there were just some things which Jack thought maybe didn’t need to happen at camp, so he gently shooed them away from the tiny grill and gave himself the job of preparing a less-charred version of whatever it was Karen and Foggy were imagining.

While he did that, Wade told him some of his more entertaining war stories.

Wade had a surprising number of entertaining war stories. Jack hadn’t realized that he’d been in the army for so long.

Nearly 6 years.

“Why’d you leave?” he asked.

“Dishonorably discharged,” Wade said. “Schiz got bad and I stabbed my CO.”

Well, shit.

“Must have been real bad,” Jack said.

Wade gave him a shark’s grin.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Real bad.”

He took a sip of beer.

That night, Jack decided he’d slept in alleys more comfortable than that damn campsite ground.

He nodded off and woke up abruptly around two in the morning to crunching outside the tent. Resolutely, he decided that his second death would not come about through idiocy, and so he waited it out.

It turned out that crunching was Matt hobbling around outside, laboring the night away with Jack’s hereditary sleep disorder looming over him.

Jack only knew it was him because Tuesday scuffled up from next to him to go investigate and Matt shushed her periodically as he meandered back and forth around the camp site.

Jack gave in around fifteen minutes after waking up and crawled out to join Matt in the dark. Matt seemed to know he was there even though it was damn near pitch black. He came up and touched Jack's shoulder in greeting and then took his hand to guide him away from the site in the dark.

It was eerie how Matt so easily moved between being both guide and guided. It was like he could smell the dark. He just seemed to know when it was his turn to hold people’s elbows.

He took Jack down to the stream just a few yards away. They both went slipping and damn near tumbling down the side of the trail, with Tuesday scrambling after through dead leaves.

The sound the rocks made seemed different at night. The water, too. It was like the grating and rush was amplified in Jack’s ears.

He heard Matt crouch down in the rocks and so followed suit. He heard a sound and saw, in the weak light, Matt dipping his hands into the water. He watched him. Then sunk his own fingers in past the jolt of coldness.

Even the water felt colder at night.

He glanced over and saw Matt watching him in his way. Head slightly cocked, the edge of his face lit softly by blue light.

“What’s it feel like to you, bud?” Jack asked him.

He got a flicker of a smile.

“Tues just thought a leaf was a fish,” he whispered.

Tuesday was a little further upstream. Jack couldn’t see her. But it made him chuckle anyways.

“She having a hard time?” he asked.

Matt’s smile was a little brighter when he showed his teeth. Jack held out a wet hand and pulled his head close enough that he could kiss his forehead.

“I’m glad you’re having fun,” he said.

“You hate it,” Matt snickered.

“It’s pretty boring,” Jack admitted.

“You coulda helped with the fort,” Matt pointed out.

Jack huffed and waved a hand.

“I got all the sticks I need in Central Park,” he said.

Matt leaned a cheek on one of his knees.

“Thanks for trying,” he said.

“Of course, kiddo.” Jack reached over with a little bit of faith and found Matt’s hair to ruffle it. “But we should probably rescue the dog. Sounds like she’s surrounded.”

Matt curled up opposite of Jack in the tent a once they returned from their late-night errand. Jack didn’t think he was sleeping, but then again, neither was he. He pulled fingers through Matt’s hair.

They didn’t say anything.

Sometimes, you don’t need to.

Karen was the first up and she made such a racket crawling into Jack and Matt’s tent that they were quickly up following her.

She’d come to take pictures. Obviously.

But her blackmail plans fell through when Matt caught her wrists and dragged her into their puppy pile. Vanessa sensed something was happening without her with her third eye and in no time, was out of her and Wade’s tent, adding her weight to that pinning Jack to the horrible hardass, rock-riddled ground.

Foggy came to break up the festivities and once Jack had escaped beautiful people hell, he and the dog went to take refuge at the picnic table.

When Wade finally deigned to rejoin the land of the living, he joined him and was immediately besieged by Vanessa who needed to be in his lap or else she would endure unspeakable suffering.

Wade’s tolerance for annoyance was untouchable.

He allowed himself to be sat on and then almost immediately abandoned in the good name of coffee (and, if Jack was reading this situation right, Vanessa’s sympathy for his tiredness).

They hiked around a lot during the second day, but things didn’t really change all that much.

There was no life-changing, perspective-altering moment for Jack.

There were just hella bugs and a lot of tromping around. There were many various forms of water to look at. Burs to pluck out of Tuesday’s fur. Matts to catch mid-trip. But beyond that, nothing too amazing, incredible or exciting.

By the end of it, Foggy looked him up and down and said, “It’s really not doing it for you, is it, man?”

No. Not really.

Jack felt a little bad about it.

“Don’t,” Foggy told him. “It’s cool that you tried anyways.”

Yeah, that’s what people kept saying.

“Was it fun?” Grace asked him two days later at their usual lunch spot. She’d made lunch this time. Chicken salad sandwiches with lettuce to combat the heat.

“It was something,” he said, having shown her all his raised and red mosquito bites. “Matty had fun. I think everything feels a lot bigger to him. You know, a whole lot of different smells and sounds and shit to break his knees on.”

Grace hummed.

“He fall into a creek?” she asked.

“Only like, four,” Jack said.

She grinned at her sandwich.

“If you’d have taken him when he was little, you’d have been carrying him around in a life vest,” she said.

True, that.

He tried to imagine taking Matt when he was a little one to the great outdoors. He probably would have loved it. Probably would have worn himself out scrambling around in fifteen minutes flat. Definitely would have slipped and rolled down a hill right into a stream. Definitely would have sat up and sprinted up the hill to do it again.

“I shoulda taken him when he was a baby,” Jack sighed.

“Hey,” Grace snapped. “No shouldas.”

Right.

No shouldas.

They didn’t do anything for anyone.

“Take him again,” Grace said.

Again?

“How?”

“You’re smart,” Grace pointed out. “You’ll think of something.”

Only Grace thought he was smart. She always had. He’d never deserved her.

“Hey,” he said, “I love you, you know that?”

She huffed a little laugh.

He didn’t let Matt go out to break his jaw or fingers in creative ways the next night.

This upset him.

He whined.

Jack told him to deal with it and come home after work.

He whined harder.

But he went and then Jack set about collecting all the linens in the house.

Matt was beside himself when his fingers scraped the roof of the fort that night. He almost didn’t even take off his suit before ducking down under it. Some prompting helped that and in no time, they were camping. Again. Kind of.

Camping in a way that matters, at least.

With a far less shitty ground to sleep on.

Matt laughed at him and made jokes about his delicate constitution. Jack let him make them and then counted all Matt’s bug bites out loud as obnoxiously as he could. Neither of them knew any stories which wouldn’t spark old traumas and so they found an app which read allegedly scary stories out loud.

They weren’t very scary. Matt had too many questions for them which he scathingly directed towards his phone for them to be scary.

Jack eventually turned it off and forced Matt to lay down while he told him stories that he never had before about their family. About Hell’s Kitchen.

Back before the bullet, Matty had been too young for these stories. Little bits of reality which he couldn’t understand or appreciate the same way he could now.

Now, Jack could smooth his hair and his cheek and tell him about his own grandfather, a grave man from the very south of Ireland who hated his daughter’s husband. He could tell him about the friends he’d had when Matty was little. The adventures he’d had on the odd nights he’d gone out with the guys after matches.

He could tell Matt about the series of failed and increasingly mortifying dates that he went on, that the guys from the gym kept setting him up on. The people who Grace tried not to laugh at when he inevitably came in to see her, boiling over with the need for someone to experience this madness with him.

Matt liked them.

Matt had his own stories. He was old enough to have his own and because Matty’s life was nothing that Jack had intended for it to be, they were all equally wild.

They then made smores over the kitchen stove.

Fed Tuesday bits of beef jerky.

And eventually decided that they’d done enough sleeping on the ground for the week, and so abandoned the blanket fort for their respective beds.

True to form, Matt didn’t stay in his.

Jack woke up to the dog breathing in his face and the screech of Matt’s alarm in the other room and soon there was a hassle as Matt snapped awake and realized he was an hour late for work.

Jack shooed him out the door with a half-tied tie and promises that he’d clean the house so just fucking go already.

And, collecting blankets off the floor, he thought that maybe he’d done right this time.