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You're mine, Harold used to say. I made you what you are. You belong to me.
*
The weeks after Harold's death are busy -- grindingly, achingly busy -- and Ward thinks, looking back on it later, that might be the only reason why he doesn't crawl back into a bottle of pills and never come out.
The company is a shambles, metaphorically and physically. Reconstruction on the top floors makes it impossible to forget even if he wanted to; there's constant banging and hammering, workmen coming and going in the elevator. There's media in his face 24/7, demanding answers for the unanswerable. There's an entire network of Hand interests permeating the company, forcing him to go over every last one of their acquisitions, their departments, their factories and holdings with the proverbial fine-toothed comb.
It's endless work that drags on into the early hours of the morning, but it fills the nights: seemingly endless nights in which he manages to scrape out an hour or two of sleep in between nightmares. Nights of coffee to keep the dreams at bay, instead of the drugs he'd rather have; nights of watching the sun come up over the city through gritty, aching eyes.
But he drags himself through it, and somewhere in all of that, he finds ... something. He finds a core of steel that he didn't know he had; he finds purpose, even if it's only a grim and dogged determination to root out every last seed that Harold had allowed (encouraged!) the Hand to plant in the company. If he's living on spite, on anger, then he embraces it, lets it carry him through the days and nights, and every day is another day further from Harold.
I am not yours, he thinks, standing in his newly refurbished office that still smells of fresh carpet and paint. I am not yours. This company is not yours. I won and you lost.
But Harold is still there, lurking around every corner. Harold is there in every twinge in his once-broken arm when it rains; Harold is in his face in the mirror, beneath the skin. Every habit: the way he takes his coffee, the way he learned to dress, to speak, to walk. All of it taught at the hard end of Harold's hand or belt, and all of it part of him now, integral to who he is.
He took a gun to the bastard, killed him twice; you'd think -- he would have thought -- it'd be enough to get Harold out of his head, but there's no way to break every tie when Harold is also in his breath and blood and bone.
I'll make a man out of you, son ...
There's no room for him in that. The only space he ever made for himself, he carved out with pills and booze, and now he's running Harold's company and he doesn't even know how to start looking for himself, doesn't know where he'd look or what he'd look for.
*
The idea of a tattoo comes to him out of nowhere. There's no specific moment he can point to later. It's just what if, along with a thousand other what-ifs (what if he'd taken Joy and left, what if he'd left without Joy, what if he ditched the company and ran off the same way Danny did, what if he took a left instead of a right turn and walked into the liquor store on the corner ...).
What if he got a tattoo.
Harold would hate it, and on that basis alone, it appeals. He never even thought about it before. The time in his life when most kids might have tested the bounds of tame rebellion by doing something like that was instead eaten up with Harold's illness, Harold's death, and then the desperate struggle to try to keep his head above water, learning to run the company and taking care of Joy and dealing with Harold, always dealing with Harold.
Anyway, Harold would have said no. Ward never even would have thought to argue about it; he knows himself well enough to know that.
But he can do it now.
I'm not yours, Dad. I'm mine.
*
Now that he's thought of it, the idea seems to grow in his mind, developing its own heft and weight. He doodles tattoo designs in the margins of paperwork, which makes him think of long-ago days spent with his sketchbooks before Harold made him stop -- perhaps the closest he'd ever been to happy. The crude, childish nature of his drawings, with hands untrained for twenty years, frustrates him now. But there's something appealing about the idea of drawing the tattoo design himself. If it looks like a child drew it, all the more suitable for sticking it to Harold, isn't it? Harold would hate him getting a tattoo; Harold would hate even more if he got a bad tattoo.
But slowly, as the idea takes hold, it occurs to him that he doesn't just want a tattoo to spite Harold; he wants it for him.
It takes him awhile to realize that it's the first time he's actually thought of doing something for himself -- something personal, something a little bit frivolous. The last couple of months have been about survival and little else. He eats because he has to, sleeps when his body is too exhausted to do anything else. He goes to NA meetings because it seems as if he ought to; it fills hours he could be doing something else. (Could be thinking; could be getting high; could be knocking back drinks in some dive bar.)
But this is the first time in months, and maybe a lot longer, that he's really wanted something.
He just doesn't know what he wants it to be, and it's in an agony of indecision, one afternoon when he's wasted the last twenty minutes looking at tattoo designs on Pinterest rather than working, that he reaches for his phone and sends a text to the one person he actually might be able to talk to about something like this. The one person who might care enough to listen, if even a little bit. Or just tell him it's stupid, because it probably is.
It's the first text he's ever sent to Danny that wasn't strictly for business or other necessary reasons, and it reads: Someone I know is looking for tattoo ideas. You're the closest thing I have to an expert. Got anything?
As soon as the text is away, he regrets it, and regrets it even more when he realizes that he forgot about the time difference, so it's the middle of the night there. And it's some six hours later, when he's crashed on the couch after a vigorous, moderately distracting workout in the downstairs gym in his building, wondering whether it's worth ordering takeout vs. just opening a can of soup and settling in with a heap of paperwork to get through the inevitable insomnia, when he gets an answering text from Danny.
One word: Dragons.
Followed a minute later by: Are you getting a tattoo?!
He could just ignore it. Turn the phone off for awhile. Pretend the text was ... he doesn't know: mistaken, misdelivered, missent. Change his number and get a new phone -- okay, that's going a bit far.
He hesitates and then types, No, of course not, it's for Megan. Remember her? The PA?
Of course I do. She's getting a tattoo? And you're asking me for advice on it?
Why do you keep sending me questions?
His phone rings a moment later. Ward seriously considers just letting it go to voicemail. But he's trying, these days, and Danny is the person he wants to try the hardest with, for the sake of what they almost were, what they perhaps could have been if Ward hadn't been ... Ward.
"Are you getting a tattoo?" is the first thing Danny says when Ward picks up.
Ward hasn't heard Danny's voice in over two months, since Danny and Colleen left on their round-the-world Hand hunt. It's strangely good to hear it now. They've been in touch via email and texts, invariably about business matters -- there are times when Ward actually needs the input of the guy who owns 51% of the company, even if he's fucked off halfway around the world -- but this is the first personal contact they've had.
Which of course he opens by lying. "No."
"A tattoo for Megan, huh."
"Yes," Ward says flatly, now committed to the lie and unable to think of a graceful way to walk it back.
"Well, you can't just ... I mean, tattoos are personal, you know? It's not like I can pick something out of a book and say that it's right for ... her." There's an almost imperceptible hesitation on the last word. Damn Danny anyway; he's obtuse most of the time and then insightful exactly when Ward wishes he wasn't. "Why does she want a tattoo? Is it just because, or is there a reason?"
He should just hang up. Instead he finds himself saying, "She went through a, uh ... a bad breakup. She wants to -- to commemorate moving forward, I guess. Not being with that guy anymore."
"Oh," Danny says, his voice soft. There's a moment of silence on the other end of the line, and then Danny says, "What about a phoenix?"
Ward barks a laugh, he can't help it. It's so ridiculous and earnest and just a little too on the nose, and exactly what he would've expected from Danny, honestly. "A phoenix."
"Yeah, you know, the bird from myth? Rising from the ashes."
"I know what a phoenix is, Danny."
"It symbolizes being reborn."
"I don't think that's precisely the issue here," Ward says, although now that it's out there, spoken aloud, it actually is the issue, more or less. However, he's pretty sure he'd rather die than get a tattoo of a phoenix.
"Dragons are still on the table."
"Dragons were never on the table."
Danny laughs, soft and warm, and Ward leans his head back against the couch and realizes that he's grinning. It's ... it shouldn't be easy to talk to Danny, not after everything -- everything, and he has to face it, that he did. To Danny. Personally.
But somehow it is, and he doesn't know why.
"Well, tell Megan," Danny says, "that she'll know the right design when she finds it. It's not really something anyone else can choose for her."
*
What he ends up with, in the end, is a geometric study: straight clean lines, representing nothing in particular. He thinks maybe it looks a little like a bird in flight, like Danny's phoenix, rising from the ashes. But it doesn't really mean anything, and that's sort of the point. There isn't a lot from his old life that he wants to carry forward. What meaning he finds now, he has to make for himself.
So the tattoo doesn't mean anything except what he wants it to mean, and what it means is moving forward. He draws it himself on blank copy paper, using a straightedge, erasing lines and redrawing until he finally has something that looks right, something that he wouldn't mind putting on his own body. He finds a tattoo shop on Yelp, and has it done on the underside of his upper arm, inconspicuous enough that it won't show -- even most T-shirts will cover it. But all he has to do is turn his arm to see it's there.
It hurts a lot more than he was expecting, but he doesn't really mind; it's like working out, the kind of pain that makes you a little high. And he finds himself looking at it often, after, as he watches it heal. Running his fingertips across it, feeling the slight differences from the rest of his skin. Like a scar. It occurs to him only afterwards that he could have used it to cover up a scar; Harold didn't leave a lot of scars, but there definitely are some: the fine white lines on the back of his hand where the broken bottle cut him, the one low on his back from the edge of the belt.
But the scars are ... they're there, whether he wants them or not, and putting a tattoo on top doesn't make anything go away, it just gives him something else to think about, to dwell on, when he looks at it. The tattoo is new. It's not the past, it's the future.
"And it's mine," he murmurs, running his fingertips across the flaking skin on top of the fine lines. It's his, all right: his skin, his bones under it. His pain, his cravings, his anger and need and wanting.
Harold might have built him, and he'll just have to live with that, but it doesn't mean he has to be Harold's vessel for the rest of his life.
*
"I knew you had a tattoo!" Danny says, a year later.
Ward is stripped to the waist and digging a rusty shovel into a heap of pig manure. They're staying with an elderly farm couple who turned down all their offers of payment in exchange for help with the chores. Ward is halfway convinced that the old folks are making an attempt to impart rural wisdom about the value of hard work and sweat equity to the city boys, which doesn't help his mood any. He gives Danny a look of combined exasperation and disbelief.
"You're just noticing that now?" There's been a lot of enforced proximity on this trip -- too-small hotel rooms, communal showers.
"Well, I don't go around staring at your arms, all right?" Danny retorts, before flashing a grin. "Can I see?"
Ward sighs deeply and turns his arm over. Danny sets down the bucket he's carrying and takes Ward's arm with gentle, dirt-stained fingers. And the next inevitable question is going to be --
"What is it?"
"Just a design," Ward says shortly. "It's not anything."
Danny smiles a little, one of those weirdly perceptive smiles, and asks, "But what does it mean?"
There are a lot of ways he could answer that. Lots of ways to blow off the question, with sarcasm or humor or a change of subject. But he's really trying for sincerity these days, especially with the people it really matters with: Danny, Joy, Bethany.
"It means I'm not his," he says.
"Good," Danny says, with a fierce anger that startles Ward into meeting his eyes. "Good," he says again, and lets Ward have his arm back, and takes a couple of deep breaths, while Ward just stares at him, not really sure (as ever) how to deal with having that kind of protectiveness turned on him. And then Danny gives his arm a shove and says, "You're filthy."
And Ward huffs out a slightly shaky laugh, getting a little distance again, a little stability. "You're the one who wanted a closer look. I don't suppose there's a shower around here?"
"There's a creek," Danny says cheerfully.
"Hooray," Ward sighs, and picks up the shovel. His hands are absolutely filthy (Danny's not wrong), and he's worn a blister to go with his new calluses. Dad would hate that, all of that.
Good, he thinks, echoing Danny, and he digs the shovel into a heap of manure, and grins to himself as he does.