Chapter Text
The first time Juice meets Tully he isn’t quite broken, yet
He's been in the cell for 13 hours, 1,380 minutes, 82,800 seconds filled with passing thoughts that crawl through his body like bacteria. He’s counted every brick in the wall, every gap in the bars that hold him, every speck of dirt on the floor that niggle his obsessive compulsion and grate on his every nerve.
For ten minutes he scrubs at that floor with his t-shirt using water from the tiny toilet bowl in the corner of his cage but the dirt only ends up spreading around.
He wonders if he’ll ever feel clean again.
For a short while he manages to fall into a fitful rest, though not one which will nourish his mind or calm his raging thoughts. There are no dreams, and that’s something small to be thankful for, but there is the blaring cruelty of confusion when he first awakens not knowing where he is, not remembering all that had gone before. For one split second (one amongst thousands of split seconds) he is still Juice, soldier of Samcro, surrogate son to one and adopted brother to many.
Then, he's not.
The memory of all he has lost is almost as painful as losing it the first time.
After 16 hours he starts to hear that blade sing out to him, a siren’s song in the midst of the suffocating solitude. He wonders how he'll last months or years if he can't last hours and he curses his own vulnerability.
(There's no place for it in this world, baby...)
He hears Gemma's voice clear as day and he knows, now, that she is the cause of all of this. She is Mayhem in human form. His breath catches in his throat, an ectopic fear that dies before it's born, and his latest suicidal inkling is held back by the phantom hands of Chibs throwing him down on the ground and telling him "brothers don't kill themselves."
He whispers his name aloud because it doesn't seem real in his head and he feels he's forgotten how it sounds.
"Ah, Chibs, brother..."
Brother.
Father.
He knows he's not a brother any more. Not now. (Not yet...) That’s why he was told to put a gun in his mouth and blow himself away.
"I'm so sorry."
The pain of his second father's abandonment is a physical ache in his belly. It's a wrenching, dragging agony he doubts he'll ever be rid of and when he digs his nails into his wrists it's with him in mind, a man he disenchanted, another father he lost for his own failures and disappointments.
He’s caught up in that excruciating thought when that cell door opens, letting in light that hurts his eyes and noise that panicks him. Alarms. Buzzers indicating locks that hold him when he hates to be held. Voices of men who can't mean well for him.
Frantic eyes look up, though he modifies them at the last minute, tries to look tough, tries to look hard though he knows he's not. He doesn’t know what to expect.
Ron Tully isn’t it. Not here. Not yet.
He'd forgotten about Tully...
“Get up, Juan Carlos,"
(That's not me)
"On your feet."
(That hasn't been me since I was sixteen years old)
“R-right.”
Juice stands to attention like the good soldier he always was, feet apart, back straight, jaw set. It’s how he’s been taught. It’s what he’s learned because Juice was never a man in control. He was never a man in a place to give command. He was infantry.
Now he’s just collateral damage, a trigger that needs to be pulled.
When Tully tells him “at ease, soldier” it’s a relief because he knows his place and that’s all he’s ever wanted. To know his place. To know what’s expected of him. He doesn’t know how this is going to go down but he knows what Jax wants.
At least, he *thought* he knew what Jax wanted.
When his eyes move down to the hand that approaches him, he feels a little more of himself die inside. The swastika on Tully’s hand burns his neck like a crucifix to a vampire. It’s stark and black against his pale white skin and Juice wonders, what fresh Hell is this, to be accosted by a man who would spit on him if he saw inside of him?
"You look about twelve," Tully says. "A real brown baby boy."
"What?"
"Shhh. No talking. Just listen."
Words pass. Juice doesn’t hear most of them but catches a few, a trilogy of P’s.
Price.
Payment.
Protection.
"You haven’t got much to offer me, kid, but I’m sure we can work something out.”
Juice knows he has but one currency in this place. The club had tried to use it before after all. He'd known going in for that subsequent stretch that he's just what lifers are looking for: big eyes and a pretty mouth. He'd spent fourteen month inside and Clay hadn't let another man touch him.
Clay isn't here.
There's nobody to stand in the way, now.
Juice's cell is six seven feet by four feet. There is barely room to move, move to breathe. There are walls and there are bars and there is grey and there nothing, nothing else.
But, then, there is white, and then there is him.
“You’re not pure. But…you’re not black either.”
His fists clench, jaw tight, eyes as hard as he can make them. They’re emptier than they've ever been, will not not tear themselves from the cell floor.
(He will not cry. He will not cry. He will not cry).
"I'll keep you close, Juan Carlos. I'll get you in position so that you can do your job, but...nothing comes free in this place. I'm sure you understand."
(I'll keep you close...)
"I'm not getting out any time soon."
He presses a hand to the small of Juice's back and it pains him so much already.
"What do you say, hmm?"
“This is wrong,” Juice whispers to nothing, to nobody, because nobody listens when he talks and he could scream his pleas from the rooftops and nobody would hear them. Nobody ever ears them.
(I'm not having a breakdown, Jax...)
"This is all wrong.”
"No it's not, sweetheart. It's survival for you. And, it's companionship for me."
When Tully grasps his jaw and tilts his head like a dog breeder assessing a stud, Juice's first instinct is to fight like he did when he was a kid, when the man tasked to care for him thought it 'companionship' too. He broke the fucker's nose and never looked back.
His hands push out against Tully trying to put distance between them.
"No!"
It's an exercise in futility because there's just not that much fight left in him.
(*)
It burns.
It burns so badly that Juice loses consciousness, his eyes open but his mind retreating so far within itself that there’s nothing of him left. He is absent. He has checked out.
He has locked himself away and the only words that reach him are “this gets done, this gets done, this gets done…”
They are his mantra. His salvation.
They are his way back.
The weight against him is harsh and heavy and the warmth of breath on his back offers no comfort but the knowledge that he is not alone. There is no real need for the cuffs on his wrists, an addition which left Juice in no doubt as to who payrolls the guards in this intricate level of Hell. They’re just symbolic.
They were just to let him know he has no power here and that nobody can help him.
Tully fucks him in silence and for some disturbing, devastating reason, that jars Juice more than any of it. More than the rape. More than the humiliation. More than the obvious play of dominance as Tully unnecessarily overpowers him.
Perhaps this is designed to throw him in at the deep end, the quintessential ‘breaking in’ of a colt, riding it hard and with force so that it knows its place and doesn't bolt or buck again. There is no crude lubricant to soften the blow, no blow to soften the humiliation of losing the one last bit of dignity that's hanging on by the thread he sewed his Judas patch on with.
Perhaps it's just powerplay, a ploy for supremacy but, as Juice lies helpless and restrained, he can’t help but think that this is some sick cosmic joke. With every movement, every thrust, every agonising blow, he wonders what demon is being driven out of him – and what evil is being put in its place?
He can’t help but choke at how unfair it feels.
Afterwards, when he hurts so badly he feels he's been turned inside of himself, Tully holds up that stark white powder as a ‘reward’ for his good behaviour.
"It'll help. It won't take the pain but it'll make it so that you don't care."
He almost, almost thanks him for it.
The AB giveth pain.
They also taketh pain away.
(*)
Ron tells Juice that Jax has given his blessing for all of this.
"Said you could use it."
It hurts more than the assaults themselves.
(*)
He only comes at night, the veritable boogeyman, and during the day Juice is left alone with his thoughts.
It's the harshest sentence possible for a man who cannot live with silence.
They won’t let him see his lawyer, can’t give a satisfactory answer as to why he’s being kept isolated and it's only a matter of time before he blows up and let's his frustration get the better of him. They insist the plan is still in place and when the time of its execution comes, they will let him know.
They tell him to sit tight then laugh as if they've made the funniest joke imaginable because Juice is locked in a cell and can barely sit at all.
As early evening draws in, he begins to lose his mind. When his pacing has made his legs ache and his obsessive regime of pushups, pullups and squats has left his muscles burning as much as his mind does, he kicks the wall and bites down on his lip so hard it bleeds. He knows that screaming bloody murder will do him no good, that bashing his head against a wall will earn him a deeper, more enforcing level of isolation where his arms will be strapped around him in a grotesque facsimile of a hug. He's been there before. Never again.
Juice is not dumb enough to think he isn’t slowly degrading, day by day, hour by hour. He's also not stupid enough to think that his estranged brothers will thank him for it.
When the sadistic guards come to take him to the exercise yard for his paltry fifteen minutes of freedom, he begs them for information.
“What *is* this?” he pleads, because he'd tried to be tough and to put on a front but he's unravelling minute by minute, hour by hour. "Why am I still here? Why are you doing this to me?”
When a small smile passes by the bastard’s lips, the penny finally drops.
“Ask your boyfriend.”
He is isolated because Tully wants it that way.
He is inaccessible because he doesn’t want to share his toy, the one that’s so shiny and new, the one that bends over when asked because that’s what its been brainwashed into doing.
It'd roll over and die if it's master demanded.
“When will he be here?” Juice asks, ashamed he’s even saying those words aloud. "Tully?"
The guards smile.
“Soon. But, he asked me to give you a present. A care package, if you will."
Maybe Juice had been expecting something other than Vaseline, heroin and a battered book of love poems, the first to make it hurt less, second, as Tully has already stated, to make him not care.
There’s something to be said for the third, the book of poems, though Juice can't bring himself to say it.
He vomits twice when the door locks behind the guards.
Gemma and Nero aren't here to clean it up this time.
(*)
He doesn’t know how much longer he’ll survive in here, not with his mind intact.
He's starting to wonder if it's worth it.
As time passes, Ron is the only constant in Juice’s life, a mark, a silencer and a filler of silence.
After he takes his payment (because that's what Juice keeps telling himself it is: payment, not rape) they talk. It's not all neo-nazi bullshit that makes Juice's skin crawl and Roosevelt's photograph of his black daddy burn into his head like an infection. They talk about things that aren’t related to clubs or groups or brotherhoods, things like sport and movies and computer games, all of the things that normal people talk about when in each other’s company for copious periods of time.
If he closes his eyes (or takes enough coke or heroin or pills to dull himself senseless) Juice can almost pretend they're just two very different guys passing the time in a very small dorm.
When Tully sits alongside him, the voices in Juice’s head are silent and that's all he wants, right now. He's come to realise he'll endure anything if it would just stop screaming.
Sometimes, Tully will read Juice poems from the book he gave him and it’s nauseating and disturbing and inappropriate and emotionally damaging – but, at least it’s not quiet. At least he's not alone with the shit that doesn't make sense and the crap that doesn't sync up.
"You're a good kid," Tully him, the well spoken man at odds with the rapist and abuser they both know he is. "You're loyal. Braver than you think. No clue why the Aryan pinup thinks so little of you."
"I did wrong by the club."
"Didn't they all?"
"I betrayed our King."
"A King is only as strong as his weakest subject. He did you wrong, Juan Carlos. Singled you out. Why are *you* the only one to suffer when the rest of them get to stay close?"
"I...I don't know."
(...it doesn't seem fair...)
Juice should know that Tully is planting seeds but he can't bring himself to care. It's denial in it's purest form and it's no longer a river in Egypt but Juice's life.
"Who knows? Maybe it's because you're not milky white like the rest of them."
"Yeah. Maybe.
"Jax is an amateur. I'll work with the kid because it benefits me - but, he's no Clay Morrow."
"...no."
Clay would never do this to him. Never.
There’s a mental disparity that befalls Juice, that screws with his mind to such a level he’s not sure where he lunacy ends and everything else begins. It’s a repellent truth that burrows deep until the butterflies in his stomach become maggots and the maggots make him bleed inside.
The truth is this:
The only time Juice feels calm, now, is when Tully is with him.
He wonders if it's been manufactured that way and, God, what kind of madness is that, the thought that anything, even this, even coercion and humiliation and force, is better than being alone? He hates himself for the fact that being held down and rendered powerless is preferable, somehow, to being left to suffer in silence.
That's what his brothers did to him.
It occurs to him, in the midst of a heroin induced stupor, that this has been his life for as long as he can remember, now. Coercion. Humiliation. Force. Jax did all of those things to him. He coerced him. He humiliated him. He forced him.
How is this different?
He tells himself it could be worse. He could be dead. Jax could've burned off his ink and killed him.
It could be *so much* worse....at least, that's what he tells himself.
"I'm tired," Tully tells him, pressing his lips softly against Juice obsessively shaved scalp. "Get some sleep, baby. I'll see you tomorrow.
Tomorrow could be the day. The beginning of the end, or the end or the beginning,
Juice is fucked if he knows which.
(*)
It's not so quiet any more.
He finds himself enjoying Bronte, wiles away hours in his cell with a gift that was supposed to be a joke but ended up a lifesaver because the words of long dead sisters are better than the cries of a dead mother murdered by a woman he loved.
“Did you read the passage I told you to?” Tully asks, first thing in the morning. and Juice nods his head like the eager student he always wanted to be but never quite had the intelligence for. He was always more interested in hot wiring quad bikes and pissing off his foster parents.
Here, now, he does his homework like a solid pupil. The words of My Comforter run circles around his head.
(A brotherhood of misery, their smiles as sad as sighs...)
They spoke to him, as Tully knew they would.
“I read it. I got it.”
“Of course you did, sweetheart."
Juice flinches at the endearment because it's not Tully's to use. Each and every time he bites back a "fuck you" because here, now, self preservation is stronger than pride - but he's no man's sweetheart and the last person to call him that wanted him dead.
(Please, sweetheart, don't kill me...)
"I know why you had me read it."
So that he saw.
So that he finally understood.
"You’re not the idiot he paints you as, kid. You shouldn’t sell yourself short.”
"Yeah. Thanks."
Juice wonders if this is Stockton Syndrome, a variant on the Swedish capital. Perhaps it’s just embracing the lesser evil, an evil that sees fit to hold him after it uses him, that compliments him after it’s taken him for all that he is.
(My comforter...)
He wonders, when did he become so starved and so desperate that this would become something he craved, like the kid that will tolerate his father's violence because he hugged him afterwards and told him how sorry he was; how much he loved him?
He takes a deep breath. He can't think about it any longer.
"So...what's going on? With Jax's plan? You keep telling me it's going ahead and nothing happens. I'm going crazy waiting. It feels like you're fucking with me on purpose."
(When will this end? Please, when will it be over?)
"Lin's in position. It won't be long now. Your debt will be paid and this will all be a distant memory. Patience, baby, is a virtue."
"Yeah. Sure."
Tully runs a finger over the scars on Juice's back, yet more blood and pain he shed and felt 'for the club.' He tries not to shrivel up, to shrink away from the touch because he's learned that Tully does not tolerate insolence well and Juice knows when he's defeated.
It's something he's learned only recently.
"You and me, we'll be done. You'll only have the Chinks to worry about."
(This gets done, this gets done. Everyone will forgive...please...everyone will forgive...)
"They're sadists. Never trust a man with slanty eyes."
"I can handle Jackie Chan and his cohorts, Tully."
"There are a lot more of them than there are of you, sweetheart."
Juice always fought harder when he was outnumbered, a life's lesson learned well.
"Of course, I could be persuaded to keep you on a tight leash if your continued existence is beneficial to my workings. There's be a price, of course, but nothing you couldn't handle."
Juice says nothing as Tully pushes his palms outward and asks: "Am I so bad?"
(Yes, yes, yes, yes...no...yes....oh, God...)
"I'll be okay."
"There are worse men than me, Juan Carlos, guys who'll make things a lot less comfortable for you."
"I know that. I'll be fine."
"No. No, you won't. Your King is counting on that."
"...yeah. Yeah, I know."
Sometimes, in the depths of his hard heroin high, Juice wonders if he’s even alive at all or whether this is some sick half-death that he cannot escape from. He wonders if he’s still hanging from that tree, his body dangling from the branches like some strange, rotten fruit that wears a face but isn’t human any more. Perhaps this is purgatory, punishment for his sins.
Perhaps God wasn’t listening when he tried to reach him at the site of his own demise.
Now, in this not-life, he feels the weight of Tully’s head in his lap, his gentle, even voice reading words of beauty and truth and love in what has come to be a painful, pilfering parody of all the things Juice ever wanted.
It sickens him that he feels comforted by it.
(*)
There’s a specific level of humiliation in being taken and petted by a man who, by way of his own ethos, considers him a second class citizen.
In a moment of bravery (or stupidity) he asks Tully what his problem with colour is; whether or not he sees the irony of an obvious-Jew like himself wearing swastikas on his skin citing white-power mantras to the blacks in the cafeteria.
The response he receives is such typical, myopic propaganda he stops listening after the first citation. He just pops another pill: Xanax, he thinks, though he couldn't be sure. Tully said it'd sedate him and Christ knows he needs the rest.
He doubts he'll be waking up in a diaper with a sign stapled to his chest any time soon.
He's gone way beyond 'pissing off his buddies'.
Tully calls him a ‘pretty Spic’, a race he turns a blind eye to because ‘Spics are good workers’ and ‘wetbacks take out the trash that nobody else wants to dirty themselves with.” It's derogatory, it's hateful - but, he somehow sees it as acceptance, as if being allowed to breathe the same air as the AB is an honour.
When he strokes a hand over Juice's head it's with an air of ownership, not affection.
Juice rubs his hand absently over his neck. Sometimes, when he's really low, he can still feel the bite of the chain as it choked him. He doesn’t tell Tully his dad was black, though, that this very fact alone started the spiral of events that led to him being here in the first place and peaked when he'd tried to do away with himself in one of Oswald's field of dreams.
He knows what the outcome would be, knows Tully would use it as justification.
Maybe he’s not ready to die yet after all.
(*)
He’s not so far gone that he doesn’t know how *wrong* this all is and how, if he does what his President has asked, there's every chance he won't come back from it.
He doesn't think he ever came back from Darveny.
Jax didn't even care.
After breakfast, on The Chosen Day, he reads that poem again, the one that has become his favourite, the one that represents him to such an extent that it could’ve been written for him. He likes it. The words are clever. The rhythm is good.
Their madness truly did madden him, that much he knows..
It briefly crosses his mind that he could’ve enjoyed this, that all those years reading nothing but motorcycle magazines and Kerrang might’ve been wasted years when he could’ve been reading something like this. Something that means something.
There's a lot Juice regrets and, surprisingly, not all of it has to do with the club.
There's a stain on the right hand page, a byproduct of his quiet rage and despair when he'd scratched at the wall until his fingers bled before returning to the book because it's the only thing he has.
He knows that Tully will see it as performance art. Bleeding passion for the old works.
When the guards come for him he feels like he's been waiting for this moment his whole life. He stands, clear and calm, though that might be the meds Tully has been ploughing him with; his own private dispensary.
He stares straight ahead. He sees nothing.
Is he just a spark?
The guards say nothing as they cuff his wrists, as they lead him from his cage by his arm. He's torn between feeling as though they're leading him to the gallows or guiding him to his destiny - the destiny Jax chose for him, whether he wants it or not
(When did what I want ever matter?)
Juice Ortiz has killed...but, he's not a killer. Not really. Not in soul and not in mindset.
He will be after today.
When he gets to the execution chamber, they tell him there are fresh clothes inside 'in case it gets messy'. For a split second (one of the near-millions passed) he loves Tully for preparing for that eventuality knowing that if the killing didn't destroy him the mess would.
(Out, out damn spot...)
He smiles, tells them he's ready but he looks deader than he ever has.
The smile ("prettiest God damn smile I ever saw" Gemma told him) stopped reaching his eyes years ago.
(*)
It's done.
Lin's done.
He's done.
Juice doesn't know why he's hoped for anything different.
He gets back to his cell and he lies on his bunk, doesn't know how much time passes at all. It could be hours, could be days but, when Tully finally gets there and Juice asks him to just make him forget, he knows there no going back.
He's finally snapped.
Tully tells him Jax will be here to see him soon, that he has to be on guard. His brave little soldier, standing to attention. Tully gives him rest for the day and, by way of 'making him forget', presses three tabs of Oxy in his palm.
"It'll help," the older man promises.
Juice remembers the burn of vomit in his throat.,
He knows it won't.
(*)
TBC...