Chapter Text
Amid the chaos of the scene that followed—the red and blue lights flashing through the front windows, the sound of confused babbling and dazed crying coming from just inside the sliding door, the low mumble of the looky-loos gathering on their well-decorated porches or stopping mid-dog-walk to record the cops on their phones—Conrad found himself doing something he rarely, if ever, felt the need to do.
He took stock of his life, paying careful attention to the series of (admittedly questionable) decisions that had brought him to that exact moment in time.
How many signs had the universe given him? How many?! Seriously, so many omens, portents, harbingers, and plain old embarrassments had flung themselves in his path since the inception of his brilliant plan that he’d lost count. He’d literally lost count! Everyone from Fliss to Brad to the CREEPs themselves had told him this was a bad idea! He’d had to grovel for help carrying it out on not just one but multiple occasions, he’d been belittled, he’d been laughed at, he’d been warned, threatened, eye-rolled, pitied, and, worse still, had his good beer pilfered from his not-even-slightly haunted refrigerator. He’d been thwarted by that shit at every turn, and what had he done?
Kept going anyway!
He’d just. Kept. Going.
“Welllp,” he muttered, a few of the others turning to look at him from their exhausted sprawl on the deck. The cutesie string of lights hanging over the space showed no sign of flickering or blinking, thank God, but they didn’t exactly help the dark circles under everyone’s eyes. He had to imagine his were looking pretty rough, too. “I guess this one’s on me, folks.”
“You don’t fucking say,” Washington grumbled around his cigarette, flicking his lighter open and holding it until the flame caught. He’d gotten a single drag off it before Ashley reached over and plucked it from his mouth, sticking it in her own.
“Warned you,” she said on the exhale, shaking her head and holding the cigarette primly between her middle and ring fingers. Had it not been for the way her arms were shaking, she would’ve been the picture of English major ennui. As it stood, she looked a little more like a chihuahua caught in a windstorm. “I warned you, I warned you, I warned you. I told you I got possessed. I told you this place was haunted. No one ever frigging listens to me, I s—hey!” She’d no sooner taken another drag than Hartley nabbed the cigarette from her, grinding it out on the deck.
Sam, finishing their little conveyor line, uncapped her water bottle and dumped a splash of water on the ashes. “Boy oh boy, you really must feel bad,” she said, not without a ghost (ha ha ha) of her usual self-satisfied smirk. “I would’ve thought you’d be thrilled with the way this turned out, Conrad! Really!”
He frowned. “What? Thrilled? Why would I be thrilled? They’re gonna have to put me on blood pressure medication after this! I’ve hated every moment of tonight, okay? Every moment. In what world would I be psyched about any of this?”
She capped her bottle again before gesturing towards the house. “Well, not to put too fine a point on it, we did find a mummy man. I guess I was expecting an ‘I told you so,’ or something. A victory dance. At the very least, I expected you to like, put your hands up in the air and yell ‘Wooo!’ a couple times.”
Wash pointed her way in agreement, then tapped out another cigarette for himself. “Yeah, seconded. When I saw those shriveled up fingers reaching for us, I thought, ‘Here it comes…’ So congrats on subverting our expectations, Bish—you know I love me a good twist ending.”
“Yeah, who would’ve guessed the real Mummy Mansion was all the friends we made along the way.” Letting his breath out in a groan, Hartley leaned back against the deck’s railing. He set his chin on Ash’s head when she curled up to his side, and the angle of his head had the police lights flashing across the lenses of his glasses. “Know what? I’d like to formally apologize. Seriously! Here I was, thinking you were talking out your ass with all that mummy man and bathtub soup crap…”
“Told you this was going to happen. Warned you this place was frigging haunted. The only person who gets to say ‘I told you so’ tonight is me,” Ashley muttered, letting her eyes fall shut as she pulled her legs up tight into her body, content enough to let Hartley support her weight. She looked about thirty seconds away from going full Sleeping Beauty, and he couldn’t blame her. That had been a lot of physical exertion for someone he’d seen struggle to carry a gallon of milk on more than one occasion.
He covered his face with his hands, then gave up completely. His pride was already beaten into the ground, wasn’t it? Why keep fighting? Conrad fell back onto the deck, splaying his arms out wide as if he planned on making a few snow angels under the stars. “Yeah, well, joke’s on you: I’m not accepting ‘I told you so’s at this time. Try again later. Seriously, how in God’s name was I supposed to know you idiots were being serious with all that Blackwood junk?! All you do is fake crap like that, for one thing, and no one in their right mind actually thinks ghosts are real, for another!”
Fliss shifted beside him, pulling her knees to her chest as she sat watching the police buzz in and out of the house. She only bothered to throw the occasional look their way, too caught up in watching Alex and Julia and the rest of their preppy posse give their statements on the other side of the sliding door. “Of course ghosts are real, Conrad. The world’s a big place, I’m sure there are even stranger things than that out there.”
Man, he really must’ve hit his head hard when Ash had thrown him into that exercise machine. “…pardon me?”
“Thank you! See, corn maze girl knows what’s up.”
“Josh, again, it’s Fliss.”
“Yeah, I heard you the first time you said that—I just think corn maze girl has a ring to it.”
“I don’t.”
“Fair enough.”
He felt someone else move then, lying down in much the same way he had, and when he glanced over, he saw Brad take his glasses off and throw an arm over his eyes. “I’ve been sleeping in a murder house. I’ve been doing laundry in a murder basement. I’ve been—” All at once, his body gave a dying-cockroach lurch, “—I’ve been breathing corpse air, oh no! There’s no way that’s good for your immune system…or anything else! Man…”
Like dominos, the rest of them followed suit, everyone lying down around him until they formed a sort of sleepover circle—Brad, him, Fliss, Josh, Ashley, Chris, and Sam, all flat on their backs, watching the night sky above flicker red and blue, blue and red.
It was hard to believe he’d been eating a hot dog and insulting the patio furniture in that very spot only twenty-four hours ago.
Thanks, mummy man.
For a while, the seven of them just stared at the stars, tired and confused and (if the telltale rumble-grumbles he heard were anything to go by) more than a little hungry. Eventually, though, that stillness was broken.
“Sooo,” said Fliss, folding her hands over her stomach as she lounged on the unlacquered deck, sounding awfully upbeat for someone who’d just witnessed the finale of a bootleg Conjuring movie in real-time, “did we learn anything from this? Or no? I’m trying to decide if anything worthwhile came of tonight, or if I should be attempting to block this all from my memory while it’s still fresh.”
Wash leapt on the opportunity to be a wiseass, surprising a grand total of no one. “I for one learned the value of $50. In case anyone was wondering, this ain’t it. The Bishop estate should expect an invoice outlining mine and my team’s expenses by week’s end. And before you ask, yes, having to talk to the cops is an additional charge, so I’d make sure I had some liquid assets ready to be exchanged first thing tomorrow morning, if I were you.”
Fliss hummed under her breath. “Not the kind of lesson I was referring to, but okay.”
“I learned Ash has a promising career as a demolition expert ahead of her,” Hartley tried, laughing when the demon princess herself rolled away from him, whining and tugging her hood down over her face. “What? What?!” he laughed, pulling her close again. “It’s a respectable line of work! There’s no shame in being a tradesman! Honestly, I think you were better at that than the whole tarot card thing.”
“Chris!”
“Your craftsmanship needs some work, sure, but you got the fundamentals down, I think. Hey, if nothing else, now I know what to get you for Christmas!”
“Baby’s first sledgehammer,” Wash snickered.
“Well, second,” Hartley corrected.
“Second, my bad.”
“Oh my God.”
Across the way, Sam joined in. “I learned the importance of entering into verbal contracts with business majors. More specifically, not to do that. Ever. No matter how nicely they ask you. Or how sorry you feel for them.”
“That’s my girl!” Josh cheered, sticking his hand up for a poorly executed high-five they had to stretch to make.
“I learned there’s a very real, very terrifying possibility Conrad has some kind of dumb, latent psychic power where he just makes crap up and it happens,” Ashley murmured. “And I want to sit and worry about that nightmare for a while, but my arms hurt too bad to focus, so one of you has to do the worrying for me, okay?”
“I learned my aversion to secrets and subterfuge was well-founded but ultimately my undoing,” Brad piped in. “And that I’ve been living with a dead person for, like, months.”
Fliss laughed, then propped herself up on her elbows. “Still not exactly what I had in mind. I mean, I appreciate the effort…”
Beaten, broken, tired, and, yeah, all right, pretty hungry by that time, Conrad made no attempt to wriggle out of saying what he knew they were all waiting to hear. “I learned I’m the world’s biggest idiot. How’s that?”
“Yeah you are,” Hartley answered.
“About time,” came Josh’s reply.
“I could’ve told you that,” Ash grumbled sleepily.
“I wouldn’t say the biggest,” Fliss offered…after a suspiciously long pause, he noted.
“But he’s up there,” Sam finished for her.
“You’re the one who said it, not me.” Still propped up as she was, Fliss must’ve seen something the rest of them couldn’t, because instead of continuing to clown on him, she nudged his shoulder and nodded towards the house. “It looks like they might be done asking your sister questions. Maybe you should…?”
Ah. So the time had come.
“Yeah, yeah, I hear you,” he muttered as, groaning, he forced himself to get up. “Hey, do me a favor? If she kills me in there, don’t let those four boneheads, like, raise my spirit, all right? Let a guy rest in peace.”
“She’s not going to kill you, dude.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, Cochise. She does suddenly have a very convenient spot to hide the body.”
Even though he wasn’t the sort of person to believe in crappy clichés like that, Conrad had to admit the house felt a little different as he stepped back inside. Maybe it had to do with the angry spirit put to rest, or the relief of not having to try and pull a scheme off, or…okay, it was probably way more about the cops, now that he was thinking about it. He forced a tight smile and raised his hand to an officer just starting down the stairs, then carefully sidled up to Julia as she stood at the kitchen table nursing a seltzer.
She didn’t turn to look at him, not right away, but there was no question in his mind she knew he was there. He hadn’t been sneaking, after all, and she made a point to heave a sigh as he joined her, so…it felt like a safe enough bet.
Silence had never been his friend, though, not even in moments like these where he was dreading what came next; he cleared his throat. “So. Guess it, uh, wasn’t a load-bearing wall.”
“Nope.”
“Probably explains the other weird wall you found when you dug up the yard, too.”
“Yup.”
“And the—”
“The smell?”
“Yeah, the…the smell.” Not his finest conversational work, admittedly.
He stole a quick glance out the sliding door and saw, wouldn’t you know it, Fliss and Wash sitting up to watch him, both shaking their heads in disappointment. Fliss turned her hands out, palms-up, as if to say, ‘C’mon, is that all you got?’ Wash, on the other hand, forked two fingers at his own eyes before flashing them Conrad’s way, the universal sign for ‘I’m watching you, idiot.’ Strangely enough, he found knowing he had an audience helped. He was, if nothing else, exceedingly susceptible to peer pressure.
Ugh. Maybe the others had been right to bust his chops the way they had…maybe he had been looking for excuses to hang out with them. Maybe he had been worried about being alone, being lonely, once JJ was off living the married life.
Man, this self-reflection shit sucked.
He took a breath and let it out—literally and metaphorically. “So. This started as a prank.”
Julia took a slow sip from her seltzer, still not looking at him. That didn’t mean she wasn’t listening. He knew her posture from a mile away, arms folded but head cocked, her eyes half-lidded as she waited for an acceptable excuse to explain whatever hijinks he’d gotten her into this time. Or, he thought, as she decided how long she’d pretend to be pissed at him before pretending to begrudgingly accept the apology he’d pretend he didn’t actually mean. Normal sibling stuff.
“I want to say upfront that no, I didn’t tell them to go ham on your support beams, and no, I had no way of knowing there was actually a dead guy hidden in your walls. Genuinely, the fact that there was a dead guy in your walls after I spent so much time joking about there being a dead guy in your walls has sort of, uh, let’s say given me both the creepies and the crawlies, so. There’s…there’s that.” When that didn’t get a reaction either, his shoulders slumped, pushing the rest of it out of him in a rush. “But I did steal a bunch of your stuff and move it around to spook you into thinking the house was haunted, and I snuck people in when you weren’t home to mess with the wiring—also to spook you into thinking the house was haunted—and I maybe kind-of-sort-of turned Brad into a very unwilling accomplice, and…at the end of the day, yeah, okay, I wanted them to freak you out. Alex more than you, but like, that distinction seems unimportant now. The whole thing seems unimportant now, if I’m being honest.”
After taking another drink, Julia set her seltzer down on the table. The hand that had been holding it moved to hold her chin instead. “Why?”
“Uh? Because we have bigger things to worry about? Like the caution tape they’re putting around the mailbox and—”
“No, Connie,” she sighed, and then she did turn to look at him, her expression exhausted. “I’m all up to date on why this was stupid, thanks. I actually like to think of myself as one of the early adopters of the ‘Conrad only has bad ideas’ club. I meant why did you want to freak Alex out? I’m your sister, I get you wanting to mess with me, that’s part of the deal, but Alex? I thought you liked him?”
Despite his best efforts, he felt his shoulders tense up with defensiveness. “I-I do! I do like the guy, JJ! I mean, he’s kind of a stick in the mud a lot of the time, and sometimes he’s so serious it feels like…forget it. I like him. I think you guys are good together. Obnoxious. Disgusting. Sappier than a pine tree. But good.”
She blinked at him. Slowly. Waiting.
“I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to do something dumb to poke at the big lug, y’know? I realized I haven’t been slinging my big-brother weight around enough, haven’t put the fear of God into him, that kind of thing. It wasn’t anything personal, just…” Oh, but the next part was going to be complicated. He had to find a way to navigate the reasoning behind his little freakout without—
“You got weird because Mom and Dad let it slip that Alex was going to propose.”
“Yeah! Yeah, exactly! I—” Okay, hang on. “How the fuck do you know about that?!”
With a groan that sounded an awful lot like a laugh, Julia bent at the middle, setting her elbows on the table. She let her head hang for a second, then looked up at him again, her eyebrows high, know-it-all arches. “How do you think, genius? They let it slip to you, probably made you swear to secrecy, then immediately let it slip to me. I thought Mom was going to have a nervous breakdown afterwards, holy cow.”
“I…what?!”
“Mhm. Swear to God, not one competent person in this family. Not a single one. She got sooo upset. Cried on the phone with me for like three hours afterwards, made me promise that I didn’t hate them for ruining the surprise.”
Of all the things he’d experienced that night, all the things he’d borne witness to, somehow this was the most mind-breaking. Conrad dropped onto his elbows as well, copying her posture as he hunched closer and lowered his voice. “What are you even saying right now?! I…are you seriously telling me you’ve known this whole time?!”
Julia made a show of rolling her eyes, really indulging in the dramatics of the act. “Do you think the decision to bring up marriage stuff with Mom and Dad was a one-sided thing?”
He opened his mouth…and shut it. The look on her face made it pretty clear she already knew what his answer was.
“Mhm. Well, for your information, doofus, Alex and I have been talking about getting married for a long time, okay? It’s not a new idea for us! I mean, think about it, we got a house together. We’re fixing it up together. We’re…” her breath escaped her in a tired raspberry, “…going to have to file sooo much insurance paperwork to handle this mess. Together. So yeah, Alex talking to Dad was a big step, and a new one, but it was a big, new step in a series of many, many other steps.”
After taking a second to process what she’d said, Conrad reached over and stole her seltzer, taking a gulp of his own. “Oh.”
She rocked to the side, banging her arm against his. It woke up every last bump and bruise he’d gotten during Ashley’s Linda Blair act downstairs, but he had to believe she’d meant it as a gesture of affection, not a warning shot. “He just wanted to go the traditional route, know what I mean? Make sure Mom and Dad were cool with it before we made anything official. But we’re set on flipping the house first, and who knows how long that might take? I mean, especially now! Since we’re a crime scene. Or, like…an illegal mausoleum.”
“But…wait, no, then why invite me to the BBQ the other night? Say it was a ‘family’ thing?”
Her eyes slid to his. Again it struck him how very tired she looked. “I hate to break this to you, Connie, I really do. But as my brother, you are, in fact, family. It’s in the dictionary and everything.”
“Okay. Fine. But then why was he talking last night about ‘something he’d been wanting to do for a while?’ That sounds an awful lot like getting ready to make some big, gooey declaration of his undying—”
Julia resumed her head-hanging, going so far as to add a low, exasperated groan into the mix. “He wanted to tell you guys—you and Brad, our brothers, our family—that he got accepted into an internship at a hospital starting this summer. It’s a big deal for med students! He wanted to tell you first, you absolute dingus! But then the kitchen exploded and the moment sort of passed.”
He knocked what was left of the can back in one swig. This was…this was all suddenly making a lot of sense. Too much sense. Shit, when she said everything like that, it almost seemed like it had been obvious from the start, like he should’ve known better, like—
“Hang on. If you’ve been planning this whole marriage thing for so long, how come you never said anything about it to me?!”
“Oh gee, let’s see. Maybe because I know you! And since I know you, I thought you might get freaked out at the idea of me, your little sister, being a grown-up making grown-up life choices with another grown-up. And since I knew you’d get freaked out, I thought you might do something, hmm, how do I put this…stupid to try and distract yourself from being freaked out in the first place. Something like, oh I don’t know…bringing Josh Washington and all of his…problems into my home.”
Whoops. “Well. Huh. Guess it’s a good thing…I didn’t do…any…of…that.”
“Yeah. Could you imagine how badly it could’ve gone?” After a beat she straightened up, taking the empty can from his hand to toss it into the recycling bin. “I’m going to be real with you. The whole time I was answering questions and walking the police around the basement, all I could think about was how much I wanted to grab you by the throat and just shake you until your stupid, ugly head fell off your shoulders.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “But. In a weird way. I guess it’s…touching…that you went to all this trouble on my account. Still stupid as hell. Dumb. Real dumb. Possibly the dumbest thing you’ve ever done.”
“Eh, I don’t think I’d go that far.”
“But,” she repeated, cutting him off, “other than giving us all anxiety for the rest of our lives and extending our remodeling schedule like six months out, I guess things could’ve ended worse, so…I’m not going to say ‘thank you,’ and I’m not gonna be like ‘aw, how sweet,’ but if insurance ends up covering any of the costs we’ve been eating lately while trying to make the basement less terrible, then I guess I can at least say I don’t hate you, and you don’t have to live in fear of me ripping your face off when you least expect it.”
“Hey, I’ll take what I can get,” he laughed, then threw his arms open wide. “C’mere. Bring it in.”
“If you think I’m about to hug you…”
“All right, all right, loud and clear.” He dropped his arms in response, but a second later, she leaned herself against him again in a show of no harm, no foul. It felt like a suitable substitute.
“I am going to get back at you,” she pointed out. “Somehow. I hope you know that. Gonna have to embarrass you in front of that new friend of yours. Who, by the way…” Like they were sharing a secret, Julia pointedly lowered her voice, “I like too. Not sure I appreciate how quickly she let you pull her into one of your idiotic little schemes, but…I like her.”
“Yeah,” he said, glancing towards the sliding door, unable to keep from smiling. “I do too. Now I just have to come up with some third date ideas that don’t involve raising the dead. Gotta keep her on her toes, y’know? Keep her interested.”
“Good luck with that.” From the living room, Emily called her name, and Julia pushed up from her lean, giving him one last parting nudge. “Duty calls,” she said, then started off for the others, assuming her good hostess posture as she went.
Conrad waited until Julia disappeared from view to head back out the sliding door and join the others on the deck. They were still a sorry scene, Ashley propped up between Hartley and Sam as she took groggy sips from a water bottle, Brad continuing to mutter about the dangers of breathing corpse dust as Wash and Fliss listened with expressions suggesting they were seconds from breaking into giggles, the flashing red and blue lights giving the whole gang the appearance of bedraggled horror movie survivors.
He plunked himself down among them, adding himself to the tableau, and shit…yeah, okay, there wasn’t any denying it; despite the peculiarity, the downright impossibility, of the night, he had to admit it felt pretty good when Fliss scooted to one side and Hartley to the other, the whole unit making juuust enough room for him to squeeze in like a missing puzzle piece.
“All right, sibling closure achieved,” he sighed once he’d gotten settled, sitting with his back to the railing and his legs splayed out in front of him. “Now I will be accepting ‘I told you so’s.”
Ashley didn’t miss a beat. “I told you so. I freaking told you so.”
“She did tell you so,” Sam agreed in an almost confidential tone, nodding along.
“I seem to remember us all telling you so,” Hartley added. He didn’t turn away from Ashley even for a second, rubbing her arm soothingly with one hand while the other hung around her waist, possibly keeping her upright altogether.
“Don’t you fret, Conman. I’m not about to rub your nose in this mess.”
“Uh huh. Thanks man.”
“I will, however—”
“Here we go…”
“—encourage you to take this moment to, y’know, take stock of the personal shortcomings that brought us here. The many, many, many personal shortcomings that brought us here. A little introspection goes a long, long way, and my guy, you could use more than a little. In my professional opinion, that is.”
Fliss leaned in. “I’ll throw another I told you so in the pot if he won’t.”
The CREEPs took to laughing (even exhausted, sleep-talking Ashley), and he let his head loll back against the railing as he sighed an “Okay, all right, keep ‘em coming,” as defeated as it was amused. Charitably, he kept the ball rolling, extending the offer further. “You wanna get in on the action while the fire’s hot, Brazzle-Dazzle?”
“No. I don’t. Not only did I go into this whole thing not knowing enough to say anything I could double-down on now, but even if I had, there’s only one thing I’m ever going to be able to think about for the rest of my life, and that’s—”
“Really don’t think one dead guy is gonna produce enough gunk to give you mesothelioma, dude.”
Washington raised his eyebrow, assuming his smarmiest expression. “Or will it?”
“It won’t,” Fliss and Ashley said in unison.
“I dunno…” Hartley taunted, “I mean…I don’t remember them mentioning that in the commercials.”
They sat there for a while, occasionally breaking into laughter, sometimes filling the silence with half-conversations that went nowhere (“Think we could get a podcast episode outta this?” “Good luck getting any of those guys to sign their rights to this story away.” “We could, like, change names around and stuff.”), but it wasn’t long before the night caught up with them. Soon, Ash and Hartley were out, leaning against each other as they slept, and if he had to guess, the bleary-eyed looks on the rest of the gang suggested they’d all be snoozing before long.
Or would’ve been, anyway, had it not been for their sudden guests.
The cops must not have seen them there, hunched together on the deck. They must’ve thought they were totally alone out there as they stood below them in the yard, staring down into the pit where once there had been a fancy-pants tennis court—it was the only explanation Conrad could find for what happened next.
“—just saying, it’s spooky, is all.”
“Fuck off. I’ll give you gross. I’ll even give you twisted. But spooky? You are getting old. Spooky.”
“You weren’t here back in ’93! If you’d’ve worked that one, you’d agree with me. This house has issues.”
“Oh Christ. Please don’t start talking about—”
“There he was. Dead in the tub. Water had been going the whole time. How long? Still don’t know. All I do know is that by the time the crime scene guys got here, we couldn’t tell the difference between him and the shower.”
“You’re a moron, you know that? An actual moron.”
“Hand to God! Could not tell the difference. I—shit, is that Lou? LOU! You worked the case here in ’93, didn’t you?”
From somewhere near the side of the house, a third voice piped in, “Probably. I…oh shit, you mean the guy in the tub? By the time medical showed up, we couldn’t tell where he started and the tub ended! The guy turned into the shower! Damnedest thing.”
“That’s what I’m saying! Damnedest thing.”
Conrad said nothing. He said nothing. He did, however, slowly turn towards Wash, his eyebrows creeping higher and higher up his forehead as he watched realization—true, horrible realization—dawn across his stupid face.
Under her breath, Fliss pleaded, “Don’t,” but it was no use. Her laughter was plain as day.
Washington took a deep breath in, holding it and Conrad’s gaze for the better part of a minute before exhaling. His eyes flicked down to the cops. There was no mistaking the mischief he saw hatching there, turning the cogs and gears of the edgy little fuck’s mind. “I’m going to be…so pissed if you’re actually some kinda psychic, you piece of shit,” he droned. Then, lower, “Fifty bucks says you can’t get the whole story out of him.”
He was already on his feet. “You’re on.”
“For the love of—Conrad!”
Oh, he was getting his $50 back. He was getting that shit back for sure, no doubt in his mind! But more than that, he was getting the nitty-gritty details of all the mummy men and bathtub soup Julia and Alex’s house had produced over the years. Every grisly drip, drab, and drop of it. Because…well, here was the thing. No matter the date, no matter the season, no matter the level of involvement they decided to trust him with after this debacle, the fact of the matter was that someday soon, those two crazy kids were going to get married. They were going to have a wedding, and after the wedding there would be a reception, and what did receptions have? Why, they had speeches, of course! Speeches made by friends! Family!
Brothers!
And while there was still a lot of uncertainty in his life, a lot of stuff he’d yet to figure out, there was one singular thing Conrad felt very, very sure of: There was no such thing as too early when it came to preparing important speeches like that. Tonight, in fact, felt like the perfect time to start getting his material in order.
“Officers!” he called as he started down the steps to the yard, friendly and charming as could be, his grin easy and his saunter even easier despite the many, many bruises he’d be dealing with tomorrow. “Nice night for an evening, isn’t it?” he asked, and the sound of his friends’ restrained laughter only cheered him on that much more.
Unfortunately.