Chapter Text
Justin spends a lot of time missing Carlo. He never used to get attached enough to miss his boys. Not when they were coming from an escort agency in West Hollywood, anyway. When he’s feeling especially shitty about himself, he thinks that Carlo wasn’t really any different than any of the other boys. It’s just that Justin met him somewhere he could get attached. He wonders if he’s any different from any of the other men Carlo might be meeting out there right now. Hopes he’s met someone good, someone who’ll take care of him and never get his stupid ass sent to jail.
He goes to the Catholic shrine on Saturdays, when there aren’t going to be any Catholics there, and he lights a candle to Santa Muerte. Mostly he prays for Carlo. Justin hasn’t really prayed in any sincerity since he asked God to make him not be a faggot anymore at fifteen and woke up with a hard-on dreaming about the football team again, but praying to the saint that Carlo prayed to makes him feel a little closer to Carlo. A little spiritual, even. Justin is pretty sure that praying for someone else to a god you wouldn’t pray to for yourself is what the Jews call a mitzvah. So he comes away from his little shrine visits with a feeling of lightness, karma being set right. Putting good energy out there into the world, he thinks. That can’t hurt.
“I noticed you lighting a votive,” Loopy says one Saturday night, when Justin is missing nightclubs. “Who is your favorite saint?”
“Oh, it’s just for my boyfriend.” Justin leans back on his crossed arms and stares at the top of the bunk. “He was Catholic. Had this saint he used to pray to.”
“Did he pass?” Loopy asks. “I’m sorry.”
“No, he got out early.” Justin barks out a laugh. “Guess the praying worked.”
“Let me guess,” Loopy says, with total confidence. “Saint Anthony. The freer of prisoners and unfetterer of chains.”
“Nope,” Justin says. “It’s the one with the skull face.”
“Ohh, you mustn't pray to her.” Loopy’s voice sounds hushed without being any quieter than usual. “She takes a harsh toll, you know. A life for every favor. No, Justin, you must stop.”
“Uh-huh.” Justin rubs at his eyes and sighs. The last thing he really wants to do is have his eccentric cellmate preach to him tonight. “All right.”
“No, you should listen to me about this!” Loopy’s voice is a little clearer and he sounds strident, so Justin looks down to make sure nothing weird is going on. Loopy is just propped up on one elbow, and he’s actually shaking his index finger at Justin like some kind of old-fashioned schoolmarm. “Forget Santa Muerte. Terrible things happen to her worshippers. Lady Death is not to be trifled with. Men have gone mad for the love of her.”
“Well, it’s not her I love, it’s Carlo,” Justin says. Then he says it again just because he can. “I love Carlo. God, you know, this is the first time I’ve said any of that shit to anyone else? I love a man. I had a boyfriend. And I’m in prison talking to you. God, I’m so mad at my life right now.”
“Then you blame God,” Loopy says. “Is that right?”
“That fucker doesn’t have anything to do with any of this,” Justin says. “Left him behind in the trailer park. I made myself the man I am today all on my own.”
“Really.” Loopy shifts position, lying on his belly and resting his chin on his hands. “Would you mind regaling me with your bildungsroman?”
“I was born in a trailer park in the wastelands of California,” Justin begins. “Dad was a Washington transplant, Mom was a native…”
Justin likes to talk about his humble beginnings because it’s the one thing he has that Tony Stark doesn’t. Born to a poor, God-fearing family who fed themselves on wild game and church pantries, a self-taught man with just a GED and a dream, started Hammer Industries out of the garage of a house he bought in Compton.
The truth is a little more complicated, and it can’t help but tumble out of his mouth now that he’s behind bars, telling it to someone who listens with wide and solemn blue eyes.
How his parents had been so burned out from the politics and New Age cults of the 70’s that they’d joined another cult going the other way, a cluster of the Moral Majority that swapped out cigarettes for weed, fervent calls to Jesus for mantras, and the San Veronica Pines Trailer Park for communes full of yurts. How his father had mixed Basic Training with Spare the Rod and bouts of sheer drunkenness, barking at him to assemble and load his gun blindfolded, fifty pushups on his knuckles if he slipped up, welts on the back of his legs from the plastic pipes they used for beatings. Hours-long sermons in stifling, moldy rooms while everyone shook and babbled around him.
Kissing Chad, the quarterback, in the woods behind the school. How he’d rode home on his bike, heart singing, only to find his mother shoving a backpack of clothes and papers into his hands, ordering him to take the truck and drive. Telling him he’d been seen, that word traveled fast. The sight of his father rounding the side of the house with his rifle, ready to fire.
The first night he’d run out of money and had gone on his knees in a truck stop bathroom, bent over in the man’s cab afterward, gotten a fifty tucked in his palm. Aching, feeling used and slimy. This is what I get for being like this. The eyes of God lifted away.
Hustling his way down to Los Angeles. Goodwill suits and faking it, going hungry to make business cards at a copy shop, sleeping in the office for the first two months of his first job, terrified he’d fuck it up and waiting for the other shoe to drop and it simply. Never. Came.
“Turns out that you don’t actually need any qualifications to be a personal assistant.” Justin shrugs. “You just kind of figure it out as you go. Before you know it, you know how to run a company.”
The engineering wasn't hard to figure out. Library books, correspondence courses, and eventually a degree when he'd thrown enough money at a school. Staying up late to study wasn't hard with money for amphetamines. Justin had always been good at figuring things out, anyway.
“Chemistry makes perfect sense,” Justin explains. “You just stick things together and they go boom. Physics, now, that's like playing pool. It's all about calculating angles. But once you calculate the angles, you're golden.”
“And what about the unexpected?” Loopy asks, propping his chin up on his fist.
“There's always something,” Justin says. “Material stresses are a big one.”
“Money, time, and manpower,” Loopy says like he’s reciting something.
“More like carbon fiber defects or smelting accidents,” Justin says. “Those can fuck up a piece something fierce. You pour your casing with the temperature too low, boom, shrapnel in Joe's face instead of shrapnel in Osama’s face.”
“Comets,” Loopy says. “Lightning strikes. Wildfires.”
“Wildcat strikes,” Justin says. “I'm the CEO. I'm supposed to have a private jet. Who the hell ever heard of a CEO without a private jet? But I made do. I sold my first private jet and bought everyone at the company steak.”
Blackwater had been little more than a jumped-up bodyguard unit before Justin had gotten his hooks into Erik Prince. The trick had been to turn the company into a cult of personality. Justin had added plenty of bullshit rules and tricks he'd learned from Pastor Bob and his Iron John the Baptist Retreats for Boys and Men. Stringent no-jerkoff regimens aided by a deeply homosocial buddy system and a ban on suspiciously specific types of pornography, fire-walking and trust falls where you explained to a brotherly audience how your father let you down, and adherence to a complex routine of exercises interspersed with motivational chants and slogans that Justin carefully adopted from selected Psalms. Lots of slogans, in fact, and lots of shit to memorize, including a long list of who it was okay to rip off.
After he'd culted it up enough for Blackwater to catch the eye of the military, it had been time to become the official supplier of their munitions with Hammer Industries. And from there, it had been just a hop, skip, and a jump to selling arms to the United States military directly.
“Once you're a military contractor, you're in a real old boy's club,” Justin says. “It's all steak and cigars and charging the Pentagon $25k for a tactical toilet seat. You can do pretty much anything you want until someone decides that trusting the wrong scientist makes you a supervillain.”
Justin has been sticking to his story, and the sticking has been good. Wanting to bring a man in out of the Cold and swearing innocence regarding his grudge with the Stark family got him enough sympathy for minimum security, anyway.
“It sounds like a good life,” Loopy says.
And that gets Justin reminiscing again. The fact had been that his life had been good, despite the constant burning news for more, the fear that he still hadn't made it and never would, the fear that everyone would see through his charade. He'd even trumpeted his humble beginnings to the heavens in interviews in hopes that he'd get ahead of his insecurities, and not a single thing had changed.
“I had a personal trainer,” he says. “Shiatsu massage. Sushi for breakfast. So much cocaine, you have no idea. Vacation in the nude beaches in the French Riviera, just gorgeous.”
“I took my daughter to the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico,” Loopy says quietly. “She wanted to see what it was like to go into the earth. We sat in the cave in the dark and breathed in the air there. I didn't like it–too enclosed. But she loved it. She didn't want to go back up into the light.”
“Tell me about her?” Justin asks, because he'd been talking about himself a lot and was starting to get a little tired of it.
“She was always saving spiders,” Loopy says. “Feeding snails, things like that. She had so much compassion, even for things that scared others. She was kind to everything.”
Loopy doesn't say anything else that night. Justin shuts up too.
“Come to services with me,” Loopy says one Wednesday at breakfast, when Justin is finishing his coffee and reading the newspaper.
“Uh.” Justin points at the little date on the newspaper. “It's not anyone's Sabbath.”
“Odin’s Day,” Loopy says. “I feel the need to be with my fellow believers on this day. If you're looking for a source of spiritual comfort that's a little less deadly to its followers, you might try it.”
“I thought you didn't like going to those,” Justin says. “That they don't usually like you there.”
“New facility, new people,” Loopy says. “I'm prepared to take a chance.”
“I'm not,” Justin says, folding his newspaper over to the financial section. “I don't even know what they do in there, man, I'd stick out like a purple banana.”
“I was hoping that they would be more welcoming if I brought a friend,” Loopy says.
“I don't think the Vikings do love-bombing, man,” Justin says.
But he goes with Loopy anyway, because the guy is weird and weedy and Justin doesn't want something bad to happen to him when it doesn't need to. People at least kind of nod at Justin here–he keeps his nose clean and his head down and tries not to talk to the wrong people for too long. He hasn't been keeping an eye on Loopy too hard, but he's just not sure about the guy.
He's not sure what he's expecting from the service in the small chapel. Maybe an iron-armed Asgardian with braided hair and a booming voice, or a bearded shaman with a staff and mushrooms. But the tattooed, pale faces that attend the service all surround a pleasantly plump person of indeterminate gender and blue hair, who introduces themselves as Tisane, holds up a drum, and reminds them that Odin is the All-Father and not the Some-Father.
Justin sits down cross-legged in a comfortable position like Tisane says, although a bunch of the guys stay standing.
“Or you can stay standing and seethe,” Tisane adds, “if you like.”
“Seethe?” Justin whisper-asks.
“A battle-madness stance,” Loopy explains as the standing guys start to rock back and forth.
“Now, we're going to journey into ourselves,” Tisane says, and starts to bang the animal-skin drum. “We're going to meet our fylga, the animal spirit that will guide us to our destiny. Just follow the beat of the drum into your own heart.”
Justin relaxes a little. This is familiar territory. This is like the movie where Edward Norton plays the guy with the split personality, the one with a more muscular alter ego that comes out to kick ass. The one where he goes to that corporate woo-woo meditation session and comes out with a penguin showing him the mantra of “Slide.” Justin is prepared to Slide–the Electric Slide, even.
So he follows the drum beat into his heart, and his eyes roll back into his head.
He's hanging upside-down, or so says the blood rushing through his nose, and the rough splinters under his skin tell him that he's on a piece of wood.
Martyrdom isn't a good look on Justin. He pulls his stretched arms in, or tries, but there's something standing in the way. It's bone. His bone. His arm isn't moving because there's a giant piece of wood through it, and his bone smacks right up against it. One in each arm, and one in each fucking leg, and then when he takes a breath he can feel cool air whistling in through the holes in his lungs–two more spears. Then there's one in his gut, rumbling cold like hunger, and one directly through his stomach that burns like the worst burrito ever, and finally when he opens his mouth he can feel the spear shoved down his throat.
The pain is just dull enough for Justin to feel absolutely everything.
He flutters his vocal cords around the spear to cry for help, but he is struck with the awareness that he has placed himself here, that he personally calculated the angle of each spear and shoved it into his body himself. He doesn't know how he could have possibly done that, or why, but he does know that he planned it so perfectly that he'll never really be able to get down.
He's going to die up there. The pain is getting colder and colder, his consciousness is shrinking, and with each passing breath he should be taking he's getting smaller.
But it feels good to unravel. The cold feels like home. Like rest. Little by little, the pain is going away.
He has awaited this, and now he steps down. His flesh rots off the spears, but his spirit is as young and strong and as old and tough as he cares it to be.
He knows he will turn and see a woman.
“Mr. Hammer?” Loopy’s voice cuts through his consciousness, and his soft and bony hand pats Justin's cheek. “Mr. Hammer, you seem to have fallen.”
Justin is on the floor, staring up at the smeary skylight.
“I was,” he says, and pauses as he becomes aware of bodies all around him. “Uh. Envisioning.”
“You said ‘Wei-la, wei-la, the Hang’d God has gone home,’ right after your eyes kinda rolled back in your head,” says one scrawny guy with antlers tattooed over his eyebrows. “What the fuck did you mean by that?”
“Nothing.” Justin scrambles backwards on his hands, away from Antler Eyebrows, but he only gets a few inches before a wave of dizzy nausea washes over him. He turns on his side, remembers the feeling of wooden spears sliding through his body, and retches.