JAWS (Complete)

Chapter 18

                *I'm right here*

Pieck opens the door, and Reiner brushes past her. He’s in a hurry, that’s obvious enough, but he’s still careful not to knock into her, and she appreciates that. He’d glanced at her crutches when they’d first met, but he hadn’t offered her his arm, or commented on them, and she appreciates that too. Today is a good leg day, and if the situation weren’t so emotionally fraught, she could probably get away with just a cane. Still, Reiner doesn’t know that, and he’s being conscious of it without calling her out, and Pieck can respect that. Someone, somewhere along the way, taught him manners.

He’s completely ignoring her now though, making a beeline directly towards Galliard and Sarge, and Pieck can respect that too. She carefully closes and locks the door behind her, remembering the first time she came into Galliard’s apartment. He’d been freshly moved in, only in Trost for a week or two at that point, his hair still shorn close all over his head, the bruises around his eyes still fading. Pieck had been shocked at the state of his apartment, and had asked him if living in a place like this was even legal.

She regrets that, now. It’s not like her place is anything wonderful, but it’s better than Galliard’s, and it had been a horribly insensitive thing to say. Galliard had gotten flustered, she remembered, and caustically reminded her that he’d just moved in and that he’d get furniture, dammit, just back off and give him time!

Seven years later, and not much has changed. The apartment is still a long, thin box, with only one window, tiny and high up off the floor, facing a brick wall. The unused bedroom—she knows Galliard sleeps on the futon in the main room but has never found out why—doesn’t have a door, only a curtain, and it’s a windowless cell. At some point, Galliard replaced the wheezing, barely functional relic of a refrigerator, but it’s a dorm-sized fridge that he has instead, one Pieck suspects he found in a dumpster and coaxed into working again. The futon is a similar find, its legs wobbly and its mattress pressed flat and stained, and the shower creaks and blasts rusty water, when it can be convinced to work at all. Galliard usually showers at the gym, she knows, or more frequently at Reiner’s, where he has the benefit of both privacy and hot water. There’s no stove or oven, only a hot plate and a kettle with a fraying cord that Pieck is afraid to use, and what furniture there is is mostly cinder blocks and plywood.

The only things of beauty and quality in the entire apartment are the two dog beds, both investments and kept scrupulously clean, and a small end table that Galliard found at a thrift store and then worked tirelessly to bring back to life, sanding away layers of cheap paint to find the hardwood underneath and then sealing it to a glossy shine. There’s also a high-end computer in the bedroom, but Pieck has never asked about it, and Galliard has never brought it up. Pieck only knows about it because Sarge once had a ball that rolled into the bedroom and she’d had to go in to retrieve both ball and dog.

Reiner pays no attention to any of it: not the water stains on the walls, not the bars on the tiny window, not the futon that looks one nap away from collapsing. He moves immediately to Galliard and crouches beside him, a hand lifting to his back, his head bending down to the same level. Galliard is leaning against the futon, his shoulders hunched in on themselves, Sarge lying on his bed in front of him, his head in Galliard’s lap. The apartment smells like a toilet, the result of the dog’s accident, and Pieck notices that Sarge’s soiled bed has been tossed in a corner and the one that’s usually by the end table substituted in. Galliard doesn’t lift his head, but after a moment’s pause, he leans to the side, letting his weight fall against Reiner’s chest, and Pieck watches as Reiner puts an arm around him and keeps him sitting upright. That’s good, that’s how it should be, and she makes her way over to the only chair in the room, another dumpster find, this one from behind the Starbucks where Galliard now works, and lowers herself into it. She’d like to get down on the floor with the boys and Sarge, but even on the best of leg days, getting up from the floor is a challenge, and she’d rather not make it into a whole thing.