turquoise

~ ten ~

"What do you guys think it is?" I hear Kie ask as I approach them on the dock. John B's rummaging through the duffel like a maniac and Pope looks worried out of his mind. I don't know why he's so stressed, but it's a pretty common occurrence so I really don't think too much of it.

"Gotta be money, right?"

"That or a couple of keys with street value to the low-to-mid-mills," JJ says excitedly.

"Can we please just open the bag?" Pope snaps.

"Wow, Pope."

"That's a rare outburst of emotion."

"Okay," he defends, holding up in hands in a placably, "you guys are literally killing me with anticipation."

"Just open the bag, John B," I tell my brother exasperatedly.

"Jeez, okay."

"We almost died over this, you know," Pope points out.

John B fumbles with the bag for a moment longer before finding some kind of metal canister. He twists open the time-capsule-looking thing, pulling out a compass.

"Oh, wow. Yup. That's about right," Pope scoffs.

I snort.

"Yeah," I agree, "good job, everybody. We found a fucking compass."

JJ takes off his hat and whacks a dazed John B on the head with it.

"Dude," he starts, and when John B doesn't respond, he shakes him by the shoulders. "I don't understand, man. It's not worth anything."

My brother waits a beat before responding in a hushed tone.

"This was my father's."

*:･ﾟ✧.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, JB and I have very different relationships with our father, and believe it or not I'm pretty much okay with it.

John B was always the clear favorite of dad's, but I was definitely my mom's carbon copy. I loved that woman with everything I had and then poof, she just up and left us all like we were nothing to her. I actually came to peace with that pretty quickly and I'm okay with it now, just like I've accepted that dad's not coming back.

He's dead.

He's dead and the shitty thing is that I don't think I care all that much. To be honest, I catch myself sometimes wondering if I even care at all.

It makes me feel awful because I know JB is beating himself up about the last conversation or, more accurately speaking, the fight that they had. My brother's in denial, he just doesn't know he is.

John B turns the compass over in his hands a few more times before slowly getting up and walking back to the house and I know exactly what he's thinking. My brother's about to take this compass as a fucking sign from the holy universe above that our father is still alive and that he needs to go out and search for him.

Bullshit, if you're asking me.