Chapter Text
“Are you excited, Sunday?” Another Family member whose name he doesn’t know asked, slicing the cast off his cast. Sunday winces, turns his head away so he doesn’t have to see the glint of the light on the knife. “I can’t imagine being cooped up inside this room for so long has done you any favours!”
Sunday nods, weak and tremouring. “Can I go out into the gardens?” He segues, uncomfortable at the attention. He can feel their stare, a palpable weight on his skin.
“Can you walk?”
Sunday frowns down at his leg. Flexes it at the calf, and winces at the pain that lances up all the way into his thigh. “I’ll manage,” he grits out. He wrings out his arm, props himself up so he can slide off the bed.
It hurts… is the first thing he notices. Really, when doesn’t it ? is his grim addendum. He’s no stranger to pain, and now they’ve become very close acquaintances.
He limps towards the direction of the door, but he’s blocked. “Sunday!” The Family member exclaims. “Just— let me help you, okay?” They grip him by the hand, begin guiding him forward. “Here, just like this.”
Something hot and terrible dislodges its way out from the tips of his fingers, dredges a burning path down his arm. It feels like poison, to be touched like this by somebody else. Like sickness. Maybe I’d cut my arm off so the plague doesn’t spread to the rest of my body, he thinks. Cauterize the wound. He can smell the flesh as it cooks, can picture his severed arm all bloodied and torn in his head as clear as he would if it were in front of him.
He wants to throw up. Then, he reconsiders. What happens if I get it on walls, the floor, the hand holding mine ? The Family member would hate him for it, sneer at him for his lack of propriety and grace. They’ll think I’m a bad person. Then, he amends, in a desperate wail that echoes around his brain: They already know I am . Once they look past the glitz and glamour, what is Sunday if not sin incarnate?
Sunday looks down to make sure he isn’t stepping on any of the cracks in the tiles, inhales deeply, and begins to pray. He doesn’t let up until he can spot Robin in the distance.
“Robin!” He calls, tries not to obviously cringe back at the frenzied sound of his own voice. He rips his hand free and limps forward as quick as he can. “Robin, they said I’m finally healed. That means I can join you.” I don’t have to be alone anymore.
Robin bounds closer. She opens her arms like she means to hug him, but Sunday flinches back. Sunday can see her posture wilt. Describing it, he’d say she droops. Sunday feels less than the dirt on her shoes, but then she smiles. “Are you feeling better?” She asks, her eyes flicking to the member of the Family some ways away.
“Are you?” He rebuffs.
“Outside, among the birds and the sky? There’s no way I couldn’t be doing better.”
“I’m…” he pauses. “I’ll be fine, soon. I think. Now that I’m out of there.”
Robin tilts her head. Sometimes when he gets in his own head and ostracizes himself from everyone else, there is just him in the us category. Everyone else, everywhere else, is them . It’s hard to remember that Robin knows him. Knows his head and his heart.
“Okay.” She says, and there’s a warble in her voice Sunday might have called worry if she was talking to anybody else. But it’s just Sunday, so that can’t be it. “Do you want to come look at something with me? Or…” she blinks at him. There’s a lot she communicates with her eyes, but Sunday thinks it gets lost in translation. This, though, he can read as hesitation. “Do you need to be alone right now?”
“I’ll be fine,” he repeats, because something has to start becoming true when it's said enough times. “What do you want to look at?”
He wraps an arm around her shoulders, and together they move.
It’s funny that he lives somewhere big enough to have its own space dedicated to the study of the botanical. Aptly named, the gardens teem with local flora and fauna. He keeps a careful eye on the ground as they move, because it’s crucial to avoid plants with a fervid temperament. Deadly nightshade, oleander — all of the plants that his mother told him to stay away from. Those are the really poisonous ones. She’d said, so long ago.
Once, when he was younger, he had spotted an innocuous thatch of poison ivy sprawling out from just beside an old tree. It had choked out all of the other plants. He had convinced himself he was crawling with hives. He was so sure he was going to die.
He’d spent the next week scratching himself raw.
“Here it is,” Robin whispers, and she sits down so Sunday has to follow. She points up. The two of them are beneath a tree, and they’re shrouded by the leaves that cascade down in ribbons. Like the tree itself is hiding something.
“A willow tree?” Sunday has heard of them before. In scripture, he thinks. Brief snippets of them here and there.
“It’s so pretty,” Robin murmurs, stretching her arm up to snap off a leaf. She splays out her hand to him, like she’s offering it up to be sacrificed. “Sunday, I wanted to say I was sorry.”
“What?”
“Mr. Gopher Wood told me that it was hurting you, leaving you all alone in the infirmary wing. That it was selfish.” Robin bites her lip, gnaws through it. An anxious habit she got from him. “I wanted us to share something…so you know that you’re never alone. I’m always here for you.” She reaches out, grabs his hand and places the leaf there.
Sunday lets it rest on his palm, numb. It feels weightless in his hand, and like the heaviest thing he’s ever had to carry. Robin snaps another one off the branch. She’s beaming when she looks at him.
“Okay?”
“I’m fine.” Looking down at his hand, Sunday really can’t tell if he means it or not.
Sunday vaguely recalls something about utensil etiquette. His mother — and his heart yearns, because his mother — had kept some books tucked away in the corner of her room. Sometimes, when she wasn’t home, he’d sneak in. It was mostly religious tomes, and he’d cherished each and every sacred printed word.
Sometimes, though, they spoke of a life not his own. Opulence, decadence. Words Sunday has come to associate with being rich. These books spoke about how the fork and the knife should be placed on one side and not the other, and how you have to bring the fork up to your face when you eat to seem polite.
He may find it a grievance to learn or replicate, but tradition is tradition for a reason. He hopes, in the pitiful back of his mind, that it’ll endear him more to Mr. Gopher Wood.
He’s almost sure he’s got it right, because Mr. Gopher Wood looks pleased, but then dessert comes.
“Why do we need two spoons?” Robin asks from beside him, a direct echo of his thoughts.
Sunday is suddenly struck. The atmosphere is so subdued that his mind is mostly quiet. Quiet enough that he doesn’t think of the repercussions. He grabs one of the spoons in his hand, digs it into her cake, and eats the mouthful before it can fall off.
“Sunday!” She yelps. “You can’t do that!”
He’s not quite smiling, but he thinks he might be getting there. Close. He can almost feel it. He's so very close.
Then, he remembers who is seated at the head of the table. He freezes. How does one repent for the simple sin of being a child?
Mr. Gopher Wood isn’t furious, or scowling, or angry. He’s smiling candidly, like Sunday didn’t do anything wrong. He shakes his head, in the bemused way you would shake your head at something so beneath you it’s laughable. "Sunday?" He prompts, so much weight behind so little words.
“Sorry, Robin.” Sunday whispers, slinking back into the cushion of his chair, “I just wanted more dessert.”
I’m not evil thrice, repeated in a mantra in his head intersects with I’m a glutton . A terrible brother . Does Mr. Gopher Wood think so too?
“It’s okay, but…” and she does the same to his cake, only this time she does it twice. “Now we’re even!”
Sunday wants to laugh, or choke out something that sounds vaguely like a laugh. He just avoids her eyes instead, looks to the right. He ends up looking at where he placed the leaf of the willow tree.
He raises a finger, delicately traces the spine of the leaf. It goes on and on. It’s a hollow comfort, but when he looks at it Robin’s words ring in his head and he feels slightly better. I’m a terrible brother, he thinks, and I don’t deserve it, but Robin loves me anyway .
Sunday misses the look Mr. Gopher Wood gives to the leaf. He’s too busy ruminating.
Sunday has always liked looking up at the sky. It might be akin to reluctant acceptance, but he’s made his peace with his inability to fly if he gets to stare up at the clouds, the myriad colours.
Intellectual that he is, Sunday is sure Mr. Gopher Wood picked out a room that had a balcony on it for this very reason. He must have known, somehow. Peered inside Sunday, dissected his pathology. Finds enough of the pieces that make up the puzzle called Sunday that have scattered — some left behind, buried deep in tall grass where they would have buried his mother if there were any of her left to bury — and manage to make something cohesive enough to study.
Sunday rests a head in his hands. Maybe he longs for the sky, too . He wonders if Mr. Gopher Wood finds fulfilment in the ground, or if he's just like Sunday — forever chasing after an idea. Clinging to something that will near see fruition. Has he ever dreamed of something, and then felt the ache of realizing that it’s futile?
Sunday looks over his shoulder at the room Mr. Gopher Wood had ushered them into.
Robin had loved the bright pinks and purples of their new room. She'd gushed about how personable it all felt. I can't wait to live here ! She had exclaimed, and she had sounded so excited. Sunday desperately tries not to think of the last room they lived in. Pretends to like it too. Like maybe the tissue and sinew of his rotting corpse aren't strewn across the rotted floorboards of a destroyed house. It’s a paltry comfort that his heart still beats, at least.
He likes the bookshelves, though. Likes one of the books in particular. The one that, when dusted off, read Odes of Harmony. Did Mr. Gopher Wood plant it there, knowing Sunday would find it? Let me help you, he had said.
I am willing to teach you.
Sunday needs help. Needs to be taught how to, effectively, not be himself. Each and every day he edges closer to the point of no return. To the irredeemable.
He flits his eyes up, appreciates the moon as it crowns the sky.
Teach me your way. He thinks. For I am willing to learn.