Title: Family Ties
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (comics)
Rating: T
<>Length: 4k<>
Content notes: Hella. Um, cursing, emotional abuse.
Author notes: Pre-series. Juliana Reyes POV
Summary: Juliana Reyes is having a quiet day home alone with her son when her brother-in-law Elias shows up to ruin her day.

 

With a second child on the way, Alberto's job with the electric company calling him out at any hour of the day or night, and little Roberto not starting preschool until next year, it was simply too expensive to hire a nanny. Her teacher's salary wasn't worth the trouble. Juliana Reyes had resigned herself to raising her children alone full-time for the next four years, slowly drifting into insanity.

To pass the time and save money, she made increasingly elaborate home-cooked meals. Today it was chicken soup, with a stock simmered from last night's chicken carcass. This required about six hours of tending, stirring the bones around the bottom of the pot and skimming off the scum that bubbled to the top of the water every half hour, while the radio murmured from the living room: waltzes that her mother had liked, when she could stand it, and gringo pop music, when she couldn't.

She'd just lowered the mesh bowl of her skimmer into the murky boil when the apartment door opened. “You're back early,” she said, looking up, but it wasn't Alberto at the door in his coveralls and safety harness; it was a lankier, paler man in a black-on-black suit that made him look like a Goth who couldn't commit to the look enough to add jewelry and eyeliner. Elias, her brother-in-law.

She didn't know Elias had a key to their apartment. “Hola, Elias,” she said.

Elias didn't look at her. He looked behind her, and across the living room, and peered down the hall. “Where's Beto?”

“On call,” she said.

“Where?”

“I don't know where. Wherever the power's out.”

“Don't kid me, chickie. Just answer the fuckin'—” He jumped and looked down at his ankles. “Doesn't he walk? What happened?”

Juliana's heart dropped down to her gut and she bolted out of the kitchen. Roberto had gotten up from his nap, he could be so quiet sometimes, and the radio had been on; there he was, on all fours with his NASCAR socks on his upturned feet, butting Elias in the shins with his head.

“Vroom-room,” Roberto said, backing up and ramming Elias again.

“He's a race-car,” Juliana explained breathlessly. “He's been doing this all week. You know. Kids.”

Elias gave no indication that he knew kids. He bent down and picked Roberto up by one ankle, letting him dangle much the way Alberto did whenever he got home, but peering at her son with the same expression Alberto used while lifting a dead possum out of the roadway. Roberto giggled, tucking his arms around his shoulders. Elias swung him through the air, and Juliana hissed.

He flung her son across the room. Roberto landed hard on the sofa and the legs squawked as it scooted backward a foot over the wood. “What?” Elias demanded, a mocking twist to his lips.

Juliana was ten years old again, mouth half-open as she grasped for some verbal decoy that would distract this unpredictable man.

Roberto rolled off the couch and speed-crawled back to Elias's ankles. “Again!” he demanded, breaking his days-long streak of communicating only in car noises.

“Darling, leave your Tio alone,” Juliana said, picking Robbie up around the waist. “He's very busy.”

“Vroom-vrooooom,” Robbie protested, pawing at the air for her to let him down. “Yirrrrrr!”

Juliana knew what her own mother would do in this situation: her mother would set Roberto up on his feet, pinch his cheeks very hard while staring intently into his eyes, and tell him to stand up straight and use his words. Her mother wasn't the worst possible parent, but Juliana thought she could do better. “Race-cars go on the racetrack,” she said, pointing him at the hallway and setting him down. “Run all the way up and back. I'll time you.”

“I'm not busy,” Elias remarked as Roberto took off, still on all fours. “I took today off special to see my big brother. And now he ain't here.”

Whatever Elias did for a living, Juliana was fairly sure that it wasn't the kind of job that made him ask his supervisor for days off. “I'm sorry,” Juliana said, usually a safe option. She glanced at the clock on the wall and stirred her chicken stock. “Twenty-two seconds, darling!”

Elias didn't leave.

He shuffled through the mail on the table, poked through the VHS tapes and books on the bookshelf, pawed through the junk drawer, squinted at her, squinted at Robbie as he scrambled laps up and down the hallway. “He just cheated on that one,” Elias reported. “Woman? I said he cheated. He didn't touch the wall!”

“He's four,” Juliana sighed. “Fourteen seconds, darling.”

“What's the point of timing him if he's just gonna cheat? How's he supposed to learn anything?”

There was a tiny switch buried deep inside Juliana's soul, that could turn from wary submission to defiance, and Elias had just flipped it for her. “Don't tell me how to play with my son,” she said, meeting his yellow-brown eyes.

Elias stared right back at her, sniffed. Behind him, Roberto crawled out of the hallway, exhausted, and squeezed under the coffee table—his current “garage.” Juliana met Elias's stare, unblinking, until Elias dug a tissue out of his pocket and blew his nose. “Shit,” he said, when the tissue came out bloody.

Elias had some kind of medical condition that Juliana had never dared ask about; a sinus infection that never cleared up. She stirred her soup while Elias wadded half the tissue up one of his nostrils and tipped his head back, then sat down on the couch. “I already do enough for you, I shouldn't have to dig out the thumbscrews for you to tell me where my own brother is,” he mumbled at the ceiling.

This was exactly why Juliana had argued with Alberto over Elias's arrangement to buy their apartment for them: gifts that big had strings attached. “I don't know where Alberto is right now,” Juliana insisted as levelly as she could manage, scraping the bottom of the stock pot with her skimmer. “He didn't tell me. I don't know when he'll be back.”

“Sure you don't,” he mumbled. Then he said something that sounded like “Jealous whore.”

Juliana let the skimmer clank against the wall of the stock pot. If Elias didn't have the courage to speak clearly, he didn't deserve verbal acknowledgment from her.

She wished Robbie had “parked” himself under his bed instead of out in the living room, practically on top of Elias's shoes. “I could call the electrical company and ask where they dispatched him,” she offered, less to facilitate a meeting between the brothers than to get Elias out of the apartment.

Elias said nothing.

She stirred the stock pot unnecessarily, watching him. Watching Roberto napping under the coffee table.

“Jesus, what are you waiting for, woman?” Elias spat at last. “Call the fuckers.”

“Don't curse in front of my son,” Juliana snapped, and then she froze, watching him. Elias only ever complied with Alberto; with her or anyone else, he just kept upping the ante, and now she'd raised it right back at him. She knew this, she was raised with this. How could she be so stupid as to provoke him, in the same room as Roberto? “Please,” she added. “Little ears.”

“He don't talk,” Elias dismissed, despite the fact that Roberto had babbled at him on and off all evening the last time Alberto had invited Elias to dinner. But he seemed mollified by the “please.”

Juliana crossed the room slowly and retrieved the phone book from the television stand, where she'd scribbled the dispatcher's extension number into the margin beside the power company's listing. She sat gingerly in the rocking chair nearby, tucking the handset between her head and shoulder and craning her body to keep an eye on Elias as she dialed. She put on her White-voice and managed a pleasant, efficient conversation in English with the dispatcher, adding a fake cough to excuse the anxiety cracking her voice—just like her mother always did. After she hung up, she announced, “Alberto's on his way back from Pomona CHECK. He left half an hour ago. Depending on traffic, it could be another hour or more before he's back.”

“Fuck,” Elias snarled. “I come all this way. It's a risk coming here, you know?”

“Perhaps you can call ahead. Or come when Alberto isn't on call. I'm sure you have other important things to do, you're a very busy man...” She watched him hopefully.

Elias didn't take the out. “I'll just wait here, then.” He peered under the coffee table. “You're a car, huh?”

“Race-car,” Robbie corrected, another slip back to verbosity.

“I got a great movie about a car. Got it on laser-disk, high-fidelity. Christine. I drive you to my place, show you the finer things in life...you're too young to be recognized, I'll talk to your papi.”

“Vroom-vroom,” Robbie agreed, and crawled out from under the table and over to the bookshelf. The kiddie VHS-tapes sat on the bottom shelf; Robbie knew not to pull the ribbon out of them after he'd destroyed Thomas The Tank Engine Season 1 last year.

Juliana blinked. “Isn't that by Stephen King?”

“John Carpenter,” Elias corrected her. “King wrote the novel.”

“So it's a horror movie.”

“It's an inspirational coming-of-age story. This worthless milquetoast's balls don't drop until he meets this beautiful car, and then he transforms spiritually, and he takes what's his, and he starts kicking all kinds of ass! And the car supports and inspires him, and they just—” He meshed his fingers together. “Like this, yanno? His friends all turn on him, they're jealous he's taking the top dog position, but him and Christine, they're together to the end!” He grimaced. “Except in the book, he tries to fight it for some reason. Rare case of a movie being better than the book.”

“That's very interesting,” Juliana flattered, “but I'm afraid it might be too frightening for a four-year-old child.” Not to mention that she was letting Elias take Roberto to his house alone over her dead body.

“You may have a point,” Elias allowed, cautiously milking bloodied tissue out of his nose and dabbing it with fresh paper. When no further bleeding began, he added, “Rugrats have this piercing scream, it's fucking painful. Can't imagine listening to that for two hours.”

Juliana wondered what other contact Elias had with children in his mysterious life. Apparently it was brief.

“Vroom,” said Robbie, waving The Love Bug over his head, and Juliana put it on for him, for the fifth time this week. The tape was starting to fuzz and wear out after less than a year of owning it, but Roberto didn't mind, parked himself six inches from the screen. Ordinarily she would tell him to move back so he wouldn't damage his eyes, but sitting that close to the television put the coffee table between him and Elias.

“Ugh,” Elias grunted as the credits began.

“You could take a walk around town,” Juliana suggested desperately.

“I don't need to be entertained,” he snarled. “If you knew anything, you'd know the last thing you want is me showing my face to your neighbors.”

I don't need to know what you do to know that, Juliana didn't say.

In a better world, Elias would sit on the couch and watch the gringo kids' movie until Alberto came home, and then they would go for a drive in Elias's car and leave Juliana to finish dinner in peace. She did not and never had lived in a better world, so instead, minutes after the opening smash-up derby sequence ended, Elias lurched off the couch and swaggered into the kitchen where Juliana was back to tending the stock. He was a head taller than her. Her feet stepped away from him without her permission as he leaned over the stove and peered into the stockpot. “Looks disgusting.”

Juliana bit her lip, clutched the skimmer in her right fist. It was a simple loop of wire mesh on a light steel handle, good only to drip on the floor.

Elias stared her up and down, empty eyes going right through her, like he was memorizing her edges. Then he turned his attention to the knife block, pulled out a paring knife, tried the edge with his thumb. “Something's good around here at least,” he remarked. “Full-tang construction. How old is this set? Fifty years?”

Juliana shrugged.

He pulled out knives and put them back in, one at a time, turning them over, examining the dull-gray patina of the carbon-steel, the worn hardwood handles, until he found “Orozco” scratched into the side of the chef's knife. “This is your mother's set,” he said, smiling at her as though he thought that was a friendly thing to say. “Beto tells me you had some rough times at home. What kinda teenager steals her mami's knives before running off to LA?” He watched her. Juliana wondered, wildly, why he kept talking. Why did Elias talk? What did he use words for, since he didn't seem to care about the response from anyone except his brother, and that only sometimes? “To protect yourself, you just need three. And not this fucker.” He pulled out the bread-knife, admired the long slim blade with its gently scalloped edge. “You take all seven, that some kinda souvenir? Or confiscating the whole lot?”

If Juliana had asked, her mother might have given the set to her. That was the logical first guess. But Elias's bizarre assumptions had actually hit on the truth: she had taken the knives so no one could use them while she wasn't there.

“Stop anybody doing this, I bet,” Elias said, lifting her vegetable knife just behind the tip with his finger and thumb. And he jerked it back and flicked it forward, flashing past Juliana's shoulder to thunk once against the wall.

Juliana didn't move. It wasn't safe. There was a wild animal in her kitchen, blocking her way out, and it had all of her mother's knives.

“Hey, Robbie!” Elias called in English. “Kid, leave that shit, I wanna show you something cool!”

“Yrrrrr-rrrr,” Robbie protested, immobilized by the television.

“He won't leave while the movie's playing,” Juliana forced out through clenched teeth. “He's four. He's four, Elias, he's my baby boy. And Beto's.”

Elias turned on his heel and left the kitchen. Juliana made a lunge for the knife block. “No-no,” he scolded, and scooped it off the counter before she could shove it in the oven. He strode out to the living room and shut the TV off.

Robbie tipped his head back and screamed.

“Jesus fuck that's loud,” Elias said, squeezing one ear against his shoulder and covering the other with his free hand. “Kid.” He prodded Roberto in the ribs with the toe of his loafer. “Kid, look. You want to see something cool?”

“He wants the movie back on, you have to warn him three times before you shut the movie off,” Juliana said. Her throat was so tight she could barely force the words out. “He's a four-year-old child.”

“Sorry for violating some kinda policy,” Elias snapped. “Kid. Kiddo! Hey! Look at me! I'll turn the movie back on, I just want to show you something cool.”

Robbie's scream trailed off. “Vroom,” he demanded, pointing at the black screen.

“Just a minute, just a minute. Look.” And Juliana's heart clenched as Elias pulled out another knife. The paring knife. “Your grandmother had great taste in knives,” he remarked, and he flung it across the room, just past Juliana's elbow. Another thunk against the wall.

“Stop that,” Juliana choked.

He drew the chef's knife, eight inches, threw it past her head. No thunk this time, a sharp pock and a clatter. “Damn. Stop what?”

“Stop. Throwing. Knives. At. Me.” Her vision was blurred, and her entire body burned with the conflict between fight and flight.

“You'd know if I was throwing them at you,” Elias scoffed, and then he threw the bread knife, which didn't even have a sharp tip to stick in the wall, right over her head. She felt it lift her hair as it passed her. It bounced off the wall and clattered to the floor.

“Elias, please stop throwing knives past me,” Juliana tried again.

“How come?” Elias selected a boning knife, long and skinny with a point that Juliana kept wickedly sharp.

She took a breath. “It scares me. I don't like it. I did not agree to be part of your circus act and you have no right to force me to stand here and take this in my own home.”

Elias, for the first time today, looked angry, and Juliana regretted it: not standing up to him, but allowing this animal the favor of her honesty. “Lighten up,” he said. “Robbie, watch.” And the flung the last two knives, one by one, past each side of her head. He set the empty knife block on the counter and gripped her hard by the shoulder, gave her a little shake. He was thinner than he should be, but he still had a painful, masculine grip. “I'm part of this family,” he said. “This is my home as much as yours. And I've been part of Beto's life a lot longer than you have. So if I were you, I'd think very hard about your place in the grand scheme of things before you try to tell me what rights I do and do not have.” He looked deliberately down at her neckline. “Whore.”

“You can't choose blood,” Juliana snarled, even though her every sensible instinct screamed at her to keep silent. “But Alberto married me.”

Elias looked puzzled at this a moment, a little furrow between the eyes; despite his cruel demeanor and prematurely lined face, he looked momentarily young. Then he bared his teeth. “Oh, that's real fuckin' cute—”

Something on his waistline beeped. His face transformed again, brow smoothing out, laugh lines appearing, his honey-colored eyes lighting up. His grip on her shoulder gentled, then he gave her a pat, turned around, pulled a pager from a holster on his belt. “Will you look at that,” he exclaimed, showing her a phone number with a local area code. “Or don't. Actually, don't. That's work!” He grinned at her as though waiting for her to say I thought you took the day off.

“I thought you took the day off,” Juliana said woodenly.

“Duty calls,” Elias said. “Good to see you guys, thanks for letting me drop in. Tell Beto I'm sorry I missed him. We should catch up.” He put away his pager, ruffled Robbie's hair, and strode out of the apartment, leaving the door ajar and most of Juliana's knives embedded in the walls.

“Vroom?” Robbie asked, pointing at the door.

Juliana crept across the living room, braced her feet on the floor against the door, and peeped through the peephole. Elias was gone. She shut it and locked it, then got a kitchen chair and braced it under the knob. Then she turned the TV back on, sat down on the couch, and sobbed quietly into her arms.

“Vroom-vroom.”

She looked up.

Robbie had his arms folded down by his hips and was slowly shoving his torso up onto the couch, sliding on his face and chest until he butted his head against her hip.

“You're getting too heavy to lift up, darling,” she said.

He kept pushing with his legs, turning sideways so he was lying halfway on the couch. “Where's Tio?” he asked.

Juliana knew that there was a lot that children could absorb without understanding. “I need to talk to you about Tio Elias.”

 

Alberto did not remark on how silent Juliana was over dinner, or about the slits in the walls, or the broken boning knife in the garbage. He enjoyed Juliana's excellent chicken soup, talked with Robbie about the kinds of cars he'd seen that day, and to the room in general about what the union thought about the latest safety gear the company had bought. After dinner, he had Juliana sit on the couch, put on her favorite sit-com, and did the dishes for her, brought her some tea as though she were sick. Brought her a blanket. Sat next to her and put his arm around her and coaxed her to lean her head on his warm solid shoulder.

Later, after Robbie was in bed with his tin-plate cars, they talked. Juliana talked. She walked him through everything Elias had done, from opening their locked apartment door to calling her a whore twice to throwing knives at her.

“So he wasn't throwing the knives at you,” Alberto clarified, and Juliana's heart dropped again.

“That's not the issue here. He was doing it to scare me on purpose, and I have no doubt, that if he wanted—”

“He's gotten so much better at knife-throwing since he left,” Alberto continued. “Before, I'd be worried. Now he's really good. You held real still, right? If you hold real still, there's almost no chance he'd hit you by accident.”

“That,” Juliana growled, “is not the point. The point is, I told him not to.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I asked him. Very reasonably. And he kept doing it.”

“Honey. Juliana, listen.” Alberto's eyes were dark and serious in the dim light, and Juliana finally thought she was getting through to him. “You can't just tell Elias 'no.' He doesn't respond to that well. Never has.”

“He's an adult!” she insisted, incredulous. “He can't just throw knives past me against my will in our apartment! Alberto! Look at me! Look at the wall! I was terrified, Alberto. In our apartment, in front of our son!” She tried a different tack. “You married me, before God and the law, and you let this man terrorize me in my home, what, because you're blood?”

“He's my brother,” Alberto said, helplessly. The only man who had a prayer of controlling Elias.

“Well, I am your wife,” Juliana said. This conversation wasn't going like it should, not from the beginning. Tears were starting and it was hard to talk, her voice coming out cracked and choppy. “I am your wife, and you married me on purpose. You knew what Elias was like when you married me. Is this how you intended to let your brother treat your wife? Because this is not what I agreed to.”

He reached out to her, eyes wide and torn. “Juliana...Honey...”

“You know what I ran away from,” she continued. “Why would you put me through that again?”

He winced, stared down at his clenched fists. “He's always been like this.”

“I know you love him,” she choked. “And I—I'll allow, in his way, he loves you. But he does not love me. Alberto? He does not love me, he won't ever love me, and he is terrifying. I won't ask you to never see your brother. But I want him to stay away from us.”

“Us?”

“Me and Roberto.”

“But he likes Roberto, he likes being an uncle,” Alberto protested.

Juliana slapped her hand down on the table. “He's insane.”

Alberto stood suddenly, his mouth thinned and his brows lowered, and again, horribly, Juliana felt small. “Don't talk that way about him.”

Juliana just stared up at him, eyes watering. The walls seemed to fold in all around her, like this life and this marriage. “I'm scared,” she whispered, and Alberto softened.

“I'll talk to him,” he offered, sitting down, embarrassed at himself.

“Tomorrow.”

“Best if he has some time to cool off—”

“Tomorrow,” Juliana insisted.

“Okay.” He looked sad, worried about what Elias would think, how Elias would feel, when Elias was the one threatening her.

All the books had told her, beware of repeating your parents mistakes in love; beware of seeking out people who will abuse you in familiar patterns. Juliana realized that she had succeeded, at least, in not marrying a duplicate of her father.

She'd married her mother instead.