Chapter Text
It’s the 23rd of December.
There is no resting through the night despite Kel’s desperate wishes for a wave of unconsciousness to roll in and send him into a dreamless sleep. The comforters smother and suffocate, but when he throws them to the floor, he’s met with the chilling blow of the ceiling fan whose incessant humming only serves as a weak watered down white noise. It isn’t nearly enough to drown out any stray intrusive thoughts that pry into his mind, but he knows that if he were to turn it off, they would only grow more intense. He flicks the television on after a few hours of tossing and turning, which he eventually drifts off to, but he isn’t granted the dreamless sleep he wants--instead, he gets nightmares. First, it’s Hero’s funeral, then it’s Aubrey’s, both wearing that all too familiar emptiness on their faces, and then it’s his own. The casket is closed; the pews are dusty and vacant. It’s peaceful, almost welcoming, but he still wakes up in his room with a pit at the bottom of his stomach.
None of this is particularly new to Kel. He is no stranger to sleepless nights or dreams of death, but when the cracks of sunlight seeping in through his window pull him back to reality, everything simply seems wrong . Or, at least, not as he left it. Both the television and fan are switched off, the smell of lemon floor cleaner lingers in the air, and the door is cracked open, letting the soft sound of clattering dishes and laughter come in from downstairs.
Realization settles in. Hero. “Shit.”
He scrambles from his bed to the hallway, tripping over his brother’s luggage on the way through the door, and stumbles down the stairs as he shakes his fingers through his hair in an attempt to subdue his fantastic bedhead. The effort is all for naught, though, because when he steps foot into the kitchen, the first thing Hero does is raise his eyebrows and say, “Nice hair.”
“Hello to you, too.”
Hero’s at the sink next to a gaping dishwasher with his sleeves rolled up, elbow deep in bleach-soap water, and their mother sits at the adjacent counter thumbing through a magazine. She’s still chuckling to herself about whatever was so funny before Kel butted in.
“G’morning, Ma,” he says, strolling over to her and planting a kiss on her cheek. “I didn’t know you already went to pick him up from the airport.”
“Morning? You slept through lunch; get your leftovers from the fridge.”
Shit. He glances up at the digital clock next to her as he does as she says. It’s just past one. “I would’ve gone with you if you woke me up.”
“I tried! But you said you didn’t want to go so…” Kel can see her shrug from behind him even without looking.
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“Well, you did.”
He decides not to press any further, since she’s clearly in a mood already. His mother has always been a bit all over the place--moods swinging from irritated to ecstatic as quick as a blink of the eye. It’s never been the worst thing ever, but it wouldn’t be a lie to say that both Kel and Hero have learned how to effectively walk on eggshells.
“Sorry, I didn’t sleep very well last night.”
She nods apologetically, which Kel appreciates, but Hero freezes as he’s placing the last of the silverware into the washer. He gives him a concerned look. “Are you still having nightmares?”
Straight to the point, as per usual. All Kel offers is a vague hum in response, hoping that he’ll get the hint and not pursue anything further. This isn’t a conversation he feels like having, especially in front of anyone else. They’ve always been a hands-on type of family--working together, playing together, grieving together--but the insomnia and the death dreams aren’t something he wants anyone else to worry about. It’s manageable, and he knows that they’d all bend over backwards worrying about it. They all bend over backwards worrying about each other. Even after Kel had hung up on Hero the night before, he still shot him a warm message:
‘Aubrey’s at home watching Sally. Get there safe :)’
Of course, Kel saw the message well after Aubrey had left, but it’s nice to know he at least tried to give him a heads-up.
Kel crosses to the microwave and starts to heat up his plate. “After talking with Aubrey for a bit, I kind of got all… y’know.” He makes a vague hand gesture around his head, and Hero seems to understand. “She totally took me by surprise.” There’s a question on the tip of his tongue, and Kel is pretty sure he already knows the answer. He glances over to his mother who is still engrossed in her reading. “Did you, uh, know she’s been coming around lately?”
There’s a pause as Hero begins to wipe down the counter under the cabinets. He speaks slowly as if he’s digesting the implications of whatever he’s about to say. “Yeah, Mom mentioned it a few weeks ago.” Kel snorts. Typical. Hero’s motions slow to a stop, and he whips his head around to face him. “Did no one tell you?” At Kel’s lack of response, he turns on their mother. “ Mom. You forgot to tell Kel?”
“Tell him about what?”
“Aubrey.”
She glances up at the two of them through her glasses, mid page turn. “I… was planning to.”
They both groan together in unison. For the first time in what felt like forever, they seem to be on the same page. Kel decides to focus on the buzz of the microwave behind him rather than contribute to their back and forth.
“Planning to? So you forgot? How do you forget to bring something like that up? It’s Aubrey. ”
“Well, I was putting it off for a while then it just slipped my mind.”
“God, you guys always do this.”
“Do what?”
It used to be small things--bits of relevant events that Kel only heard about weeks or months after they took place. But he finally realized that they had a communication problem after he came home last summer break to find that Hector had died two months beforehand, and no one had bothered to tell him. That’s when it finally dawned on him that they didn’t just walk on eggshells around his mother; they did it around him, too.
The two go on for a bit--their mother piling on the excuses and Hero gallantly defending Kel’s honor like they both aren’t standing in the same room as him--but Kel only snaps back in when his mother stands up in her seat and says:
“He’s fragile , Hero. I didn’t think he wanted to hear about her after how it ended between them.”
Hero is about to shoot something back at her, but Kel cuts him off. “ Ended? Nothing ever ended. It just…” he refuses to meet either of their eyes, not when there’s a lump lodged in his throat when he didn’t even know he felt that strongly about it in the first place. “She moved, and we drifted apart. I’m fine, I promise.” Neither of them look convinced.
There’s a pause before his mother starts to cross over into the kitchen space. “Kel--”
“Why did you even invite her to spend Christmas with us if you thought I was too ‘fragile’ to handle it?”
Hero slams the dishwasher shut. “You what? ”
“Well, both of them seemed fine when I got there.”
This has officially escalated into territory that Kel does not want to trek through. “Okay, I’m done,” he raises both of his hands, pushing through the two of them and offering Hero what he hopes looks like a grateful expression. “It’s too early for this. I’m gonna go shower, let me know if there’s anything I can do to help around here now that I’m awake.”
“It’s one.”
Kel grunts and waves a dismissive hand before he’s completely out of sight and makes a beeline to the bathroom before one of them can suck him back into their argument, which he only manages to drown out after he’s turned the shower knob, and the water is pounding against the porcelain tub .
-------------------
Hero, to no surprise, is waiting for him in the living room when Kel finally decides it’s safe to return downstairs without the fear of being met with a teary-eyed apology or the long list of excuses his mother likes to pull out whenever she’s overstepped a boundary (which happens much more frequently than it should). He’s hunched over on the near side of the couch, staring into the muted television with his brow furrowed in the way it does when he’s buried himself into a hole of thoughts and has lost his way out. There’s no question that he’s dissecting every sharp jab he and their mother took at each other forty-five minutes before, but Kel has never figured out whether his brother mulls over the details of an argument from a place of guilt or if he’s stubbornly locking down on everything he said. The apologies flood through so quickly though that it really doesn’t matter either way. He’s sure that the two of them exchanged hugs and kisses before their mother escaped off into her room to sleep off the residue of the aggression.
They catch eyes and the deep lines embedded into Hero’s forehead iron themselves out. “Mom wants me to go to the store.”
“So you two are good?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. There’s some food items she forgot to get on her last run, and she also needs more wrapping paper.”
Kel blinks. “...Is this an invitation or something?”
“If you want it to be. I figured you’d want to get out of the house anyway after that thing from earlier.”
That thing. Kel imagines saying it himself, feeling the phrase roll around from his molars to the tip of his tongue. It feels disgusting.
“Everything’s pretty much done after that.” He pulls at the collar of his sweater awkwardly. “I guess that itinerary was pretty unnecessary, huh.”
He snickers. “I honestly almost hung up on you after you said that time table shit last night.”
“You did hang up on me.”
“Different thing, and also not the point. I don’t know why you even tried to plan any of this out. You know Mom’s spontaneous like that.”
“It’s not just Mom, Mr. Half-Hour-Away. Still can’t believe you did that without even leaving, like, a voicemail or something.”
Kel’s face burns, the memories of the thirty-six hour fever dream that led up to his early departure striking down upon him. He’s almost positive his dorm neighbors heard him talk to himself for six hours straight, and he’s already positive that they think he’s crazy. They’d catch him alone pantomiming his thoughts in the common hall, or complain to the RA about the radio volume before his roommate gave him those earbuds. Inconsiderate , a voice creeps up his neck and hisses. He grits his teeth and ignores it. “At least she didn’t freak out like you thought she was going to. I was fully prepared to lose my TV privileges.”
“Consider them revoked… now!” Hero clicks the remote and the set turns off with a small blip of static. “So, are you coming with me or not?”
Kel doesn’t have to think about it twice: “ Please. ”
They decide to walk instead of taking the car, even though they’ll have to lug bustable plastic-bags back to the house in almost freezing temperatures. It’s silly, but Kel doesn’t mind after taking in the sight of their car-filled driveway and the thin string of lights hanging off of the edge of the roof. If they took his car, they’d only ruin the view. Kel tells Hero this, and he rolls his eyes in that endearing, older brother way and ruffles at his hair like they’re kids again.
“It’s getting long,” he notes after effectively rubbing it back into a bedhead.
Kel pats at his hair to fix it even though he knows there’s no use and hums in agreement. “I should get it cut soon. Long hair is harder to manage. Longer showers, too.”
“Only you would complain about taking longer showers.”
“I wasn’t even complaining!”
Hero ignores this and examines his hair like it’s a middle school science experiment. “Maybe you should test out a few gels or something.”
Kel grimaces. “Gels?”
“Mhm. It’d give you more versatility.”
“Sounds like too much work, if you ask me,” he huffs. “I already have enough trouble getting out of bed in the morning; how am I supposed to dedicate time to how I look? Hair is just hair, Hero. All I need is a haircut. Maybe I can get Aubrey to do it for me. You know she’s done with hair school, right?”
After an awkward beat of no reply, Kel glances over to his side. Hero’s frowning hard again, but it’s not the same as it was earlier at home--it’s worry. It makes Kel worry. The worry is infectious; their family passes it around like a disease there’s no cure for.
He stuffs his hands into his coat pockets, suddenly aware of how the cold has seeped into his fingertips. “What?”
“Kel… if you need to go see someone again, you can find a psychologist near your campus. Mom and Dad wouldn’t hesitate to help you schedule an appointment.”
A haircut to a psychologist? It nearly gives him whiplash. “Huh?”
Hero slows to a stop as they pass the entrance to Faraway Park. The childish chatter and laughter coming from inside its gates make Kel painfully aware that they are, in fact, in public, which is not a place he would want to discuss this, if he even wanted to discuss it all, which he doesn’t.
“If you’re struggling to get out of bed, then that might be a sign, y’know.”
That’s when it all dawns on him: how stupid it was to let Hero defend him; how stupid it was to come home a day early; how stupid it was to joke around with Aubrey; how stupid it was to talk about his stupid hair; it’s all just stupid.
Stupid, stupid, stupid--
“We don’t have to talk about this right now, but you can come to me with anything. I know it’s been hard to stay close since the shit with Aubrey went down, and even more so after you moved to college, but--”
“Hero,” it comes out like a breath that he’s held for hours. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
Hero blinks. “...Okay. We’ll talk later then.”
He says it without question, but he stands there like he’s waiting for an answer . An answer that Kel doesn’t want to give him. An answer that isn’t no .
They stare at each other until Kel can hardly take it anymore. A kid from the park lets out a high-pitched squeal.
“Maybe.”
It’s Hero’s turn to let out a sigh he’s been holding for eternity. It clouds the space between them then dissipates just as quickly like it was never there in the first place. He’s satisfied. “Great. Let’s go before we freeze.”
Kel hums and they continue the walk to the plaza. They somehow vaguely pick up the conversation where it left off as they run their errands, but there’s a nagging at the back of his brain and a whisper hooked onto his neck that keeps him distracted, detached. Hero throws him some more worried glances when his responses get slower and choppy, but, thankfully, doesn’t press.
As he pushes their cart through the isles, he imagines thrusting it forward, planting a steady foot on the lowest bar, and speeding through the store like he used to with Sunny and Mari before closing time. He remembers Sunny sitting in the basket with his knees clutched to his chest, living and breathing. Mari never got much of a ride out of it, because neither of them were strong enough to push her very far, and Hero always chickened out and stayed behind. She used to tell Sunny it’d be more fun to face forward, to see the canned goods stretched out before him and to feel the thrill of almost crashing into the shelves upon shelves of boxed ones, but he always faced Kel.
“Ready?”
Sunny would nod and close his eyes, his lips slightly upturned into an anticipatory smile, and Kel would push off the ground with all of his strength, sending them soaring.
At the checkout, Kel snags a pack of cigarettes, which gets him wide eyes from Hero and what seems to be the beginning of a scolding, but he stops mid sentence, presses his lips into a thin line, and makes a comment about how they’d kill him if he kept the habit up.
That’s the point, he retorts in his head, but Hero glares at him like he heard it. .
When they finally get back home, their mother has emerged from the depths of her bedroom and has immersed herself in scrubbing at the hardwood floor that Kel already spent an hour mopping the night before.
She looks up at them from the ground, heaving from the effort she’s putting into it, and says with a wide smile, “Aubrey called! She’s coming for dinner tomorrow.”
There’s a beat. Hero heaves a heavy sigh and starts for the kitchen. “That’s… fine.”
A thousand question marks pop around in his head. They both watch him disappear before his mother mutters, “Do you know what’s up with that?”
Kel sniffs. “I have no idea.”