Chapter Text
Merritt McKinney would not consider himself a bad person, per se.
Being mean sometimes was not the same as being an asshole 24/7; after years of experience testing out what constituted going too far, he walked that line very well. As much as he delighted in making people uncomfortable by revealing information garnered via mentalism to the general public, he knew there were lines, boundaries, and things better not shared.
Case in point: Jack Wilder’s childhood.
It wasn’t that Merritt had been intentionally trying to discern what Jack’s life was like before the Horsemen, but the kid kept dropping hints everywhere. It was impossible for Merritt to not pick up on the pattern.
“Is he asleep?” Atlas asked incredulously, and Merritt flicked his gaze from the TV to where Jack was curled up on the floor. He inspected the kid closely, and sure enough, his eyes were closed and his chest was rising and falling steadily.
It belied belief. The lights were on, the action movie they were watching was blaring the jackhammering sounds of warfare, and their heat was broken. The lack of heat was the only reason they were all watching a movie--while Jack had just one quilt haphazardly on him, the other three Horsemen were bundled in blankets. It was winter.
“I think he is,” Merritt said, noting the tremors shaking Jack’s shoulders. He was shivering in his sleep. Merritt sighed. Sometimes not being a complete asshole was intensely inconvenient.
Making himself get up, he snatched a spare blanket from the couch and moved to place it over Jack’s shoulders. However, the second his shoes shuffled even near Jack, the kid startled awake, scrambling away from Merritt and throwing his hands up in defense. He’d been quiet about it, though, and neither Danny nor Henley glanced over from where their eyes were glued to Tom Cruise doing some kind of insane stunt.
Merritt stared at Jack. Jack stared back, his chest heaving slightly, the panicked look in his eyes slowly starting to ebb and be replaced by embarrassment. “Just me,” Merritt said quietly, dropping the blanket in front of him and retreating to the couch. Whatever that was about, Jack clearly didn’t want to talk about it, though he did mumble his thanks.
Merritt tried to put the incident out of his head and refocus on the movie, but he was resoundingly unsuccessful. After that, a pattern became painfully obvious to Merritt, especially since he bunked with Jack.
The kid simultaneously could fall asleep anywhere, no matter how uncomfortable the position he was in, and yet he was the lightest sleeper Merritt had ever encountered. In any environment, any position, he was asleep in seconds, but if cloth so much as rustled near him, he was jolting awake in a panic.
It wasn’t hard to come to the conclusion that Jack was accustomed to being unsafe while sleeping. He never relaxed in sleep, and he carried tension around with him at all times. He also had nightmares—quiet ones, that left him silently crying and trying to regulate his breathing. It was abundantly clear that Jack was trying to hide the nightmares from Merritt, so the older man never said anything about them.
But that wasn’t all.
“That is disgusting, Danny,” Henley said, wrinkling her nose and throwing down her napkin. “Where did you learn to cook?”
Merritt, who would never try to eat something out of mere politeness, had already started scraping his heap of simultaneously burnt and undercooked food into the trash. No amount of water would be able to get that taste off of his tongue, and he went straight for whiskey instead.
“I didn’t,” Daniel replied as Merritt poured himself a glass. “I did tell you this.”
“This isn’t getting you out of cooking duty,” Henley warned him. “Over the next year, you’re going to learn.”
Danny himself had evidently given up on his own food, given that his phone was on the table and open to a Chinese takeout menu. “Does anyone else want anything?”
Merritt settled back down at the table, whiskey in hand. “Pass the phone when you’re done,” he said, and Henley echoed the request. Merritt frowned at where Jack, across from him at the table, was still shoveling Danny’s horribly cooked “food” down his throat.
“Jack,” Henley said gently. “You don’t have to eat that. Danny knows it’s shit.” Daniel shot her a flat look, and she raised her eyebrows at him.
Jack paused for barely a moment, finishing off—finishing off? How the fuck did the kid eat all that shit so quickly—his plate. “Tasted fine to me,” he mumbled, avoiding eye contact as he stood to put his plate away.
Merritt narrowed his eyes at Jack as Atlas shrugged and went back to ordering takeout. The food could only barely generously be called edible, and the kid had scarfed it down in minutes.
Once Merritt started paying attention to Jack’s eating habits, he noticed so much more. Jack tended to hoard food, especially if it was free. Sample at the mall? Disappeared into his jacket pocket. Mints from a restaurant? He’d have eight stuffed up his sleeves before their visit was finished.
He also got tense, his jaw clenching and his posture stiff, whenever the rest of them wasted food. Every time Danny, Henley, or Merritt scraped food into the garage can of their shared apartment, Jack looked like he was holding himself back from saying something.
It was also tried and true that the kid would eat literally anything, and everything he ate, he ate fast.
Jack’s sleeping habits, his eating habits… it all started lining up. He seemed to forget that he had access to running water for the first few weeks, he braced himself when entering the apartment before relaxing in almost imperceptible surprise when it was heated, he didn’t have more than two outfits before joining them, and he overall acted like he was never once safe.
So no, Merritt didn’t mean to deduce that Jack had been homeless before this whole ordeal, or that he had likely been homeless since he was a teenager, but Jack’s body language and actions gave Merritt a cascade of tiny moments that added up all on their own—he hardly even needed to put the pieces together.
But he knew, and he couldn’t un-know, and for whatever reason, Merritt felt a strange protectiveness towards the kid. (It probably had something to do with the fact that he mentally referred to Jack as kid, even though he was 20-something years old.) So he did what he could.
“Why are there so many granola bars in your guys’ room?” Atlas asked, mid-search for an errant tie, digging through Jack and Merritt’s drawers in the likelihood that it had gotten mixed up in the laundry. Danny’s tone wasn’t accusing, just baffled, but Jack froze up, his face flushing. The cards he’d been shuffling stuttered in his hands, the slight whisper of paper on paper winking out.
“Now why would I walk all the way to the kitchen if I can just keep a snack in here?” Merritt asked, leaning against the doorway. Jack was still tense, Danny’s gaze skeptical, and he continued. “Never know when the urge for a midnight snack is going to hit, and I’d rather not set off every creaky floorboard in this place and have to hear about it from you in the morning.” He flashed Danny a sharp smile, not letting himself look at Jack. “Gotta make sure you get your beauty sleep. You need as much of it as you can get.”
“Alright,” Danny muttered in exasperation, dropping the granola bar back into the drawer he’d taken it from. “Just make sure you only keep sealed foods in here, the last thing we need is an ant infestation.”
“Got it, Dan,” Merritt replied.
As Atlas concluded that his tie was not in their room, Merritt finally turned to Jack. The kid was looking at him wide-eyed, confused and a little wary. Merritt sighed internally. The vigilance was something that never seemed to leave Jack’s frame, and Merritt wished there were something he could do to help him understand that he was safe.
“Why did you do that?” Jack asked quietly, and Merritt shrugged easily, hoping he projected carelessness.
“In case you somehow missed it, messing with Danny is one of the only entertaining pastimes around here.”
Jack relaxed slightly, snorting and turned back to his card tricks. “I’m sure he thinks the same thing about you.”
The conversation ended there, and Merritt continued to try to subtly cover for Jack, while never letting the kid know what he was doing. He couldn’t go letting Jack think that he cared, or something. Because he didn’t. He was simply not an asshole—mean sometimes, but not 24/7.
Jack’s very few possessions was also on Merritt’s list of concerns, particularly his clothes. Danny had made some kind of snide comment about how all of Jack’s outfits looked exactly alike, not seeming to realize that they were all the exact same. From what Merritt could tell, Jack had two pairs of jeans, one T-shirt, one long sleeve shirt, and his leather jacket. Given how much trouble Jack had asking for help with even the simplest things, Merritt was positive that the younger man would not accept an outright gift of new clothing. So he did the next best thing.
“These are too small for me,” Merritt said, tossing a pair of sweatpants at Jack, who was sitting on the bottom bunk in their room. The pants hit Jack straight in the face, and it was amusing to watch the kid buffer for a second. “Keep ‘em if you want. If you don’t, throw them out.”
Jack held the sweatpants out at arm’s length, eyes narrowed. “I’ve never seen you wear these before.”
“Didn’t you hear me?” Merritt asked, letting some mocking enter his tone to cover for the fact that the sweatpants were brand new. “They’re too small for me.”
Jack shrugged, accepting the lie at face value. He was shrewd, clever, and usually pretty good at sniffing out bullshit, but he’d also started to slowly but surely trust Merritt. Merritt, in turn, had zero qualms about using said trust to help the kid in ways he wouldn’t overtly accept.
By the end of their fourth month living together, Merritt had managed to pass off three long sleeved shirts, a pair of jeans, two T-shirts, and a winter jacket onto Jack, with various excuses. Henley had somewhat caught onto what Merritt was doing and put a couple of her bigger shirts in Jack’s laundry pile, and soon, the kid had enough outfits to last at least a week.
Merritt told himself he was only doing this because how Jack looked reflected on all of them, and they couldn’t have him rotate between the same two outfits once they started performing in a few weeks. He told himself that he felt nothing besides professional concern for the kid, and that absolutely nothing uncoiled in his chest when Jack grew more and more relaxed in his sleep.
Merritt McKinney, not-bad-person-but-part-time-asshole, was such a liar.