Chapter Text
The thing about almost crying in front of someone was that you had to see them again afterward.
Andy had managed it with something resembling dignity, which was a generous way of describing what had actually happened, and October had been. Fine about it. Normal about it. Had not brought it up or looked at him differently or done anything that would have given Andy a clean reason to be defensive, which was somehow worse than if he had. There was nothing to push against. Just October, moving through the days like the road outside the hedgerow hadn’t happened, like Andy hadn’t stood there and come completely apart at the seams over two words and a jacket.
Andy was choosing to interpret this as a mutual agreement to never speak of it again.
He was fairly sure only one of them had agreed to that.
He was thinking about this, specifically, on the second evening with the merged groups, when Reese appeared next to him in the way she had, no announcement, no preamble, just suddenly there, and said:
“You have a last name, or were you some orphan?”
Not really a question. More like a hypothesis she was testing.
Andy looked at her sideways. “What?”
“Orphan. I assum-“
“I have a last name, ass. What’s yours.”
“Bosco,” she said.
He looked at her.
She looked back, expression doing nothing in particular.
“Bosco,” he repeated. “…like the cafeteria food.”
Something happened in her face. Small, almost imperceptible, the barest loosening of something that was usually held very tight. They shared a look, brief and mutually reluctant, the specific look of two people who have accidentally found something in common and aren’t sure how they feel about it.
Then Andy said, because the conversation had a momentum and he wasn’t thinking:
“Souris.”
He felt it the moment it left his mouth. Not dread exactly. More like the sensation of a key turning in a lock somewhere, a click that shouldn’t have happened.
Reese went very still.
Not the dramatic kind of still. Not the kind that announced itself. Just a slight, surgical pause, a recalibration, like a calculation running behind her eyes that she didn’t want him to see.
“Souris,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“By any chance,” she said, and her voice was exactly the same, exactly as even as it always was, which was somehow the most unsettling part, “do you know a Kyle Souris?”
The name landed like something physical.
Andy felt it hit somewhere in his chest and travel outward, a specific kind of cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. His jaw tightened. Something moved through him fast and hot and he caught it, barely, shoved it back down before it could finish arriving, and pulled his face back into something that resembled neutral.
“Sounds familiar,” he said. Light. Unbothered. The deflection assembled itself so automatically he barely had to think about it, years of practice, the specific skill set of someone who had learned very young that showing things got you nowhere. “Common name.”
Reese looked at him.
Andy looked at the sky.
He could feel her doing it, that inventory thing, that quiet clinical taking-stock that she aimed at everything eventually. He kept his expression where it was and breathed evenly and waited for her to move on.
She did.
“Hm,” she said, which was what she said when she’d finished filing something away.
They sat in silence for another minute. Andy didn’t trust himself to say anything else so he didn’t. The sky had gone the dark grey of early night, the kind that wasn’t quite dark enough for stars yet, just a flat heavy nothing pressing down.
Eventually Reese stood up.
“Night,” she said.
“Night,” Andy said back.
She went inside.
Andy sat very still on the concrete and stared at the nothing sky and told himself he’d handled that fine. He’d handled it fine. She didn’t know anything, she’d said a name, he’d played it off, it was fine. Common name. He’d said common name and she’d said hm and that was it that was the whole thing it was completely fine.
He believed this.
He went inside twenty minutes later and found his spot and lay down and closed his eyes and believed it very hard until something close to sleep arrived.
Reese found October before the camp went quiet.
He was where he usually was, which was wherever the most people were, talking to someone from the other group about something she didn’t catch the beginning of. She waited at the edge of it, patient, and when the conversation wound down and the other person drifted away she stepped in.
October looked at her with that particular expression he saved for her, the one that was still recalibrating, still adjusting the image of her he’d been carrying for months against the actual person standing in front of him. She’d stopped finding it uncomfortable. It was just information.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
His expression shifted. “What happened.”
“Nothing happened.” She glanced across the room, to where Andy was lying on his back with his eyes closed, one arm over his face. “I was talking to your friend.”
October followed her eyeline. Looked back at her. “And.”
“His last name is Souris,” Reese said.
October waited, clearly not sure why that mattered.
“October.” She kept her voice low, even. “Kyle Souris. He’s this doctor that I met when my group went eastbound; his whole group seemed to gravitate away from him. For a reason too.”
She watched it land.
Watched October’s face do something she hadn’t seen it do in a long time, a complicated sequence of things moving through it in quick succession, putting pieces together, arriving somewhere and not liking where it was.
“He never told me his last name,” October said, quiet.
“I know.”
“He never—” October stopped. Looked at Andy again. At the arm over his face, the deliberate closed-off posture of someone who had decided to be unavailable for the rest of the night. “When you mentioned it, did he—”
“He played it off,” Reese said. “But I saw it.”
October was quiet for a long moment.
She watched him absorb it, watched him sit with the weight of it, watched him do the same thing she’d done out on the concrete, which was try to work out what you were supposed to do with information someone hadn’t chosen to give you.
The difference was that October’s version of that question had a different shape to it. More personal. More complicated.
She’d known that before she came to find him. That was why she had.
“Don’t make it weird,” she said.
October looked at her.
“Whatever you’re planning to do with that,” she said. “Don’t make it weird. He doesn’t know I told you and he thinks he got away with it and if you go over there right now and—”
“I’m not going to go over there right now.”
“Good.”
Silence.
October looked at Andy again, and Reese looked at October, and she thought about the way her brother had changed in the months he’d spent out there looking for her, the particular way he was different that she hadn’t been able to name until tonight.
She could name it now.
She didn’t say it out loud.
Some things inherited their own timing.