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It happens so quickly, he’s lucky he even notices it. One minute he’s trying desperately to answer a barrage of inane questions from Zuzu (no, he doesn’t know how a Frosmoth would wear pants, please stop asking him) and ribbing Piers for browsing Pokėgram or whatever instead of helping; the next he’s glanced up and Piers looks… well, he always looks pale, but suddenly it’s skipped past the usual Spikemuth resident, possible vampire look to actually about to vomit everywhere, like seriously should I go grab you a bucket or what.
He’s about to ask what’s happening when Piers stands up, mumbles something halfhearted about needing a piss, and disappears into the bathroom without any further explanation. He turns to watch him leave, perplexed, and when he turns back a moment later Marnie is staring after Piers (and by extension, straight at Gordie) with agonizingly undisguised suspicion.
“He’ll be back in a second,” he says, lying through his arse. Marnie doesn’t look to believe him for a second, but she does at least turn that tiny, piercing gaze off of him for the time being.
And you know, for the first few minutes, he really does think there’s a non-zero possibility Piers will be back and re-composed before too long. Maybe something they had for lunch didn’t agree with him (it wouldn’t be the first time; Piers’ scrawny body seems incapable of handling anything richer than a bag of crisps), or he saw some dumb shit online that he couldn’t properly react to without Zuzu and Marnie noticing and demanding to see (also not the first time; Gordie’d nearly smashed his phone trying to keep Zuzu from seeing the menswear ad he’d been ogling over that one time). But then one minute turns to five, then ten, then fifteen, and in-between fending off more of Zuzu’s moon-logic questions and requests-slash-demands to braid his hair, he feels a certain dread settling in his gut.
At coming on twenty minutes, there’s a tug on his sleeve (and really, he thinks he ought to be commended for just jumping at it, rather than shrieking like a disturbed Vullaby), and when he glances down Marnie is staring silently back up at him. And honestly, she doesn’t need to say a word for him to get the where the hell is my brother loud and clear.
(Which, to be fair. Him too, kiddo.)
He glances as subtly as he can in the general direction of the bathroom door, just enough to confirm that it’s still very much closed. Well. Desperate times call for desperate measures, he supposes.
“Hey!” He chirps as loud as he can, clapping his hands together. “Isn’t Snom and Friends about to come on??”
Zuzu shrieks with delight and gallops off to sit in front of the telly, and Marnie follows with visible dismay, but all the same dutifully settles in next to the younger girl as she prattles on about what happened in the last episode. His mum’ll be furious that he plopped them down in front of cartoons and ditched rather than try to properly entertain them, but given the situation, he thinks the lecture will be well worth it.
By halfway into the theme song, he’s both convinced they’re distracted enough for him to slip off, and bored to tears enough that he’s willing to risk being noticed anyway.
His plan (if you can call it that) comes to a brief halt in front of the bathroom door — can he risk knocking without the girls noticing him? He probably shouldn’t just barge on in, right? ...what is he, stupid, of course he shouldn’t just barge on in — before he settles on just testing if the door’s locked before anything else. It isn’t, to his surprise, and though he lets go of the knob before it can creak open more than the smallest fraction, he covers his eyes reflexively anyway, just on the off-chance Piers really is, well, less-than-decent. There’s neither a move from within to close the door back up, nor any indignant shouting, so after a few moments he finally uncovers his eyes and — admittedly against his better judgement — creaks the door open enough to slip in the rest of the way.
To his relief, Piers is still very much dressed (not that he’d have a huge problem if he wasn’t — not that he wants to see him undressed—), but what he finds is… still pretty surprising, actually. He’s cracked open the bathroom window and is leaning out it, pale arms exposed to the chill air in his usual training tank, a lit cigarette in one of his hands.
It’s certainly no secret that Piers smokes, at least not to Gordie. But he normally avoids smoking around him at all (I know y’don’t care for the smell), and never in his house (he’s sure his mum knows he smokes, given she and Piers have a weird league-members slash intergenerational-friendship thing of their own going on, but she hates the smell even more than Gordie does and Piers is polite like that). In all the time Piers has been coming over to hang out and help babysit — which has been literally years — he’s not once snuck off to have a smoke, always waiting until they were out and about or he was back home in Spikemuth.
Which is to say, this was really, really weird of him.
He hasn’t so much as turned around to acknowledge Gordie’s slipped into the bathroom with him, and for a moment he considers slipping right back out and pretending he hadn’t intruded on Piers’ weird twenty-minute bathroom smoke retreat. But he doesn’t really want to go back and face Marnie without her big brother in tow (plus, you know, Piers is acting really mad and he’s legitimately worried and wants to know what’s gotten him so out-of-sorts), so instead he makes sure the door’s closed behind him, crosses the room, and leans as casually as he can manage against the wall beside Piers.
“Couldn’t even wait to get outside before sneaking a smoke, huh? Marnie’s going to be cross with you,” he quips with forced levity, because it’s always been easier to get some bant going than to speak honestly about how he’s feeling, and Piers usually takes that kind of bait.
“Mm,” is all Piers has to say in reply this time around. He doesn’t even look away from the window, let alone point out that it’s pretty bloody weird that Gordie walked straight in here without so much as knocking after being told Piers was having a piss.
The silence is long and makes his skin itch. You’re acting odd as hell, he wants to say. Please tell me what’s wrong, I’m worried. I care about you, stupid. Please talk to me, Piers. “Guess it’s your vampire blood keepin’ you from catching cold,” he says instead, like an idiot, elbowing Piers in the side.
“Yeh, guess so,” Piers replies. Not a single reaction beyond that. It’s all Gordie can do to keep from slapping himself.
“Uh,” he says, because apparently nothing will stop him from putting his foot in his mouth today. “I finally had to give in and put Snom and Friends on for Zuzu. Marnie looked so cross about having to put up with it. You’ll help me figure out how to get her to forgive me, right?”
He doesn’t even get a response for that one, so he just barrels on. You know, like an arsehole. “I wonder how long she’ll manage before finally snapping and telling Zuzu it’s stupid? Probably not much longer, right? Hopefully Zuzu’ll age out of liking it before she does. Y’know, for both our sakes. Don’t wanna deal with them getting in a big row, yeah?”
“My mum died,” Piers says.
Gordie feels his gut drop through the floor like a block of ice, and the silence in the air becomes suffocating enough that even he can’t manage to squeeze a word out of his breathless lungs. Even after what feels like hours, all he can say in reply, dumb and quiet, is, “Oh.”
Piers — ever-unflappable, ever-forgiving Piers — somehow responds to that with a mere shrug, rather than a well-deserved get the hell out and leave me alone, you insensitive dickhead. “I ‘unno why I even looked ‘er up,” he says, more to himself than anything, so softly Gordie probably wouldn’t have even heard it if he hadn’t been standing right next to him. “Just… do, once and a while, out of morbid curiosity, I guess. See if she’s done anything worth gettin’ in the papers.” He stops to take a long drag off his cigarette (it occurs to Gordie suddenly that he’s probably smoked more than one since coming in here), and for a moment he thinks that’s all he’s going to say, but then he mumbles, “This time there were an obituary.”
“Oh,” Gordie says again, because what way to make it more obvious he’s an absolute goon than to say it twice. He wracks his brain for something more… helpful to follow up with; something like are you doing okay or is there anything I can do or I’m here if you need to talk or anything. But despite all those perfectly reasonable options, his subconscious apparently decides it would rather he fasten his foot that much more firmly in his mouth, because he instead blurts out, “How did she die?”
“Overdose,” Piers replies without flinching, even as Gordie is visibly cringing at his own insensitivity. Quieter, through another drag of his cigarette, he mumbles, “Should’ve known that’s what she was doin’, out at all hours all the damned time.”
Gordie doesn’t know what to say to that, and by some miracle, manages to convince his fool brain that that’s reason enough to keep his trap shut. He’d never really known for sure what Piers’ family situation was, to be honest — he knew his folks were out of the picture, at least; had been as early as when they first met back during their go at the gym challenge, when he’d walked into Turffield Stadium and saw a kid his age loitering around in a far corner with a worn suitcase and a two-year-old on his hip. (He’d offered to watch her while Piers made his go at the gym, seeing as no one else looked to be eager to help and he needed some kind of practice before his new sibling arrived in the spring. They’d been fast friends ever since, which he supposed was inevitable, given they were both young and queer and figuring that out and all-too-ready to shout fuck the system even when they didn’t know what systems they were fucking.) Piers had always been dodgy about the specifics, though, any questions about his family answered with noncommittal shrugs or vague they’re not arounds or outright changing the topic.
(Given his mum was, apparently, a neglectful addict, he supposes he now understands why.)
The freezing, choking silence stretches on, each passing moment a reminder that he’s in over his head, that he’s got no idea what to say or do, that he can’t even manage a basic I’m really sorry, Piers like a bloody human being. (He also can’t help but think about how many times he’s thoughtlessly vented about his own mum to Piers, complaining about her shunting off babysitting duty like she just expected him to have nothing better to do and the unspoken-but-certain plan to have him take over the gym when he was older despite his complete ineptitude with ice-types. Really pretty childish complaints, in retrospect, especially given A) Piers was friends and more-or-less-coworkers with his mum separate from his friendship with Gordie, and B) Piers had a fucking neglectful addict mum so bad he’d had to step in and raise his sister alone when he was bloody thirteen.) He’s so lost in his thoughts that he doesn’t even register himself speaking until it’s too late, a quiet, uneasy, ever-insensitive, “Are you… sad about it?”
That one finally gets even Piers to flinch, and Gordie is in the process of incoherently babbling words in the hopes of some of them string together an apology when Piers answers, “I ‘unno. No? Maybe.” He sighs heavily, reaching one hand out the window to stub his cigarette out on the old-brick side of the house, the other running up through his thick, dark hair. “I mean… fuck, Gordie, what do I got to be sad about? I feel like I ‘ardly knew the woman. It’s been, what, four, comin’ on five years since we so much as spoke a word to each other? Y’might as well have told me my, fuckin’, my third cousin twice-removed just passed for ‘ow close we were.” He reaches his hand up to his face and blanches, as if it just occurred to him he’d stubbed out his smoke, and his left foot starts tapping with nervous energy the same way it does when he’s playing music, though the overall vibe here is decidedly different. “But— but at the same time— y’know, it’s my mum. Ought to have some grief for losing a mum, yeah?”
“I mean,” Gordie starts, and stops for a long moment, because the question is probably rhetorical and he hasn’t had a great track record with talking today regardless. But Piers peeks at him out of the corner of his eye with an unspoken expectation to continue, so he relents and repeats, “I mean. It… it sounds like she was a pretty shitty mum. I don’t think anyone can blame you for not bein’ torn up about losing someone who was hardly around for you in the first place.”
Piers is quiet for a long moment, looking somewhere between distraught and thoughtful, before nodding more to himself than Gordie. “I just. I ‘unno. I’m not not sad, right? But I’m not— I ‘unno,” he repeats with a heavy sigh, both hands dragging up his face to fist roughly against his scalp. Brow furrowed and body scrunched in on itself like that, Piers suddenly looks much, much older than seventeen. (He’s always felt older to Gordie than the less-than-a-year that separates them, what with running the Spikemuth gym and playing the odd gig and raising Marnie all on his own, while Gordie fucks around at his mum’s gym and watches Zuzu once and a while and wonders when he’s finally gonna lose his ever-present baby fat.) Yet at the same time, for the first time in a very, very long time, it strikes him that despite how grown-up they both like to play, he and Piers really are still just a couple of dumb kids.
Yet again at a loss for words, Gordie does what he thinks (hopes, please for the love of all things decent) might be the first half-useful thing he’s done since entering the room, shoving off the wall to move to Piers’ side and wrap an arm carefully around his shoulders.
Blessedly, Piers’ response is immediate and, if he’s reading the room correctly, deeply grateful, his entire weight seeming to lean into Gordie’s side. (Not that that’s a lot of weight; Gordie could probably throw Piers over his shoulder and carry him around without so much as breaking a sweat.) Gordie holds him all the tighter in silent reply, letting his carefully-sculpted hair brush against his cheek, hears the long, shaky sigh that sounds like he’s been holding it in for hours. “I just feel, like,” he starts, almost too softly to hear, and then trails off for a very long moment. “...nah, nevermind. S’stupid.”
“Something being stupid has never stopped me from saying it and you know it. Why should it stop you?”
That actually gets a laugh (a quick, breathy, snorted one, but a laugh all the same, and bloody hell he’ll take that). He still doesn’t follow up on whatever he was saying, though, and Gordie figures he’ll leave it there because, unlike him, Piers’ brain actually has some degree of control over the dumb shit he chooses to say.
Which, of course, is why he’s so surprised when he actually hears Piers’ voice a moment later, mumbling, “I didn’t… didn’t expect it to actually happen, y’know? Knew it were just a sad, unlikely little dream. But… it, like. When she was alive, so long as she were out there, it wasn’t impossible that she’d get better, yeah? That she’d clean herself up an’ regret bein’ such an awful mum and come apologize an’ beg for forgiveness. And like, I didn’t — fuck, I don’t know if I even would’ve forgiven ‘er if she had, and she almost certainly wouldn’t, but—”
He trails off with a wet, quivering little breath, and Gordie squeezes his shoulders all that much tighter. (Is he crying? He’s afraid to look. He can only think of one other time he’s seen Piers cry, and even that wasn’t a proper cry, just him sitting tight-faced and blinking back tears because that day had just been too much in every respect.) After what feels like years, Piers shifts in his hold, and he thinks for a moment that he’s finally gonna tell him off for barging in on him and make him leave. But no, instead he just turns, tucks his face into Gordie’s shoulder, loops his arms around his waist, acting for all the world like he’s trying to hide in the other’s embrace.
Really, Gordie doesn’t think he can be blamed for responding by pulling him tighter, holding him close, letting him hide. (This close, he can feel Piers’ uneven, shallow breaths, feel the way his hands are shaking where they rest at the small of his back, feels tear-dampened eyelashes tickle at his neck just above his shirt collar.)
“...’S just never gonna happen now,” he feels more than hears Piers say, voice muffled against his jacket. “Not just unlikely, now, s’impossible. She’s never gonna get better. She didn’t get better. She was just so shit that she didn’t even care when I took Marnie ‘n left and then she kept not caring and then she died. That’s how this ends, now. Don’t even get some fuckin’ closure, she’s just a shit dead mum and that’s that.”
“Piers,” Gordie says, because really, he doesn’t know what else he can possibly say. He lets Piers bury his face in his shoulder that much more, bordering on painfully so, and runs a hand up and down his bony back because he remembers his own mum doing that for him when he was younger and much more of a crybaby. “You can… you can cry if you need to, man. I don’t care. I won’t tell anyone.”
To his surprise, Piers responds to that by shaking his head almost violently. “Marnie’ll see,” he mumbles by way of explanation, voice tight. “She’ll see and be all worried ‘till I tell her and — fuck, Gordie, I don’t want her to have to deal with all this, too. Like, how the hell’s she supposed to feel? I ‘unno if she even really realizes she had a mum out there. Too young when we left to remember ‘er proper, that’s for sure. I can’t be ‘ere asking ‘er to mourn for someone she don’t even know—”
It’s cliché, he knows, but fuck if listening to Piers say all that doesn’t make his heart just break. (Piers is always doing this, thinking about Marnie and the gym and all of Spikemuth and him and the league and anything and everything before himself, always putting his own needs at the very bottom of an ever-growing pile.) “I’ll tell her I said something stupid to you and made you cry, then,” he insists, holding Piers ever-closer. “She can be mad at me instead of askin’ you questions, then, I can manage that. Or, uh-- or you just stay overnight, yeah? You know mum’s always thrilled to have you over for dinner, and she’ll help look after Marnie and I’ll set up a cot for you in my room, and once everyone’s sleeping you can cry all you want and I won’t tell a soul. Then you’ll be all cried out and cleaned up by morning and no one will know any better, yeah?”
Piers laughs at that again, a little lighter that time, but he doesn’t move from where his face is buried in Gordie’s shoulder, nor does he let up on holding close. (Piers is gangly and bony, smells unpleasantly of cigarette smoke and less-unpleasantly of cheap hair gel, and is unexpectedly warm around his core. Gordie does his damndest to keep his hands moving in soothing circles around his back, to not give into the very real temptation to explore the too-present jut of his ribs, to slip down his sides to where he’s sure he could feel a hint of his hipbones.) “Maybe I’ll do that, yeh,” Piers mumbles against his neck. “Can’t hurt, really, sleepin’ over. Marnie’ll be pleased. Always loves bein’ over here, you know. Better ‘n our little flat by miles.”
“Mum’s always telling you that you can come stay anytime you like,” Gordie huffs, a little more petulantly than intended. (Gordie wishes Piers would come and stay more often, both because it objectively is loads better than the flat in Spikemuth where Piers doesn’t even have a bedroom of his own, and because Gordie likes having company his own age around. Likes having Piers’ company, specifically, but. That’s besides the point.)
Piers nods against his shoulder again, and there’s another moment’s pause, softer, less oppressive this time around. “I’m not gonna cry now,” Piers says, apropos of nothing, and it occurs to Gordie after a moment that it’s because he’s saying it to himself, trying to talk himself out of the unsteady breaths and shaky fingers.
“You’re not,” Gordie replies, gentle, hoping it’s the right thing to say. After another minute, Piers’ breaths have steadied and his hold has softened, so Gordie feels it appropriate to clap him on the back and mumble, “Probably oughta wash your face before we head back out there, though.”
“Yeh, probably,” Piers laughs again, finally moving away from Gordie just enough that he can press the heels of his hands against his eyes. (Unexpectedly, Gordie momentarily feels colder not having him flush up against his body.) When he moves his hands away from his face, he looks… a little worse for wear, certainly, but probably not to the point he would be if he’d had a proper cry. Back from sickly-pale to regular-old-Spikemuth-pale, dark circles only slightly more pronounced than usual, the only real damning evidence of his previous state being the newly-mussed smear of his eyeliner. He looks at Gordie in silence for a long moment, then claps his shoulder and says, surprisingly soft and fond, “You’re a good mate, Gordie.”
“Yeah, right,” he snorts in reply, averting his gaze and hoping his tone comes off joking (which it isn’t) rather than mildly pained in its honesty (which it is, because really — really, he’s not. A proper good mate wouldn’t be struggling to come up with even the most surface-level comforts for a grieving friend, wouldn’t be jamming his foot in his mouth at every opportunity, wouldn’t have come bursting in here and forcing Piers to talk to him in the first place.
...a real friend wouldn’t be missing holding Piers close already. Wouldn’t blush every time he sat too close, wouldn’t think about holding Piers’ hand or wrapping an arm around his slim waist. Wouldn’t wake up flushed and warm and longing from a dream where he’d reached up and kissed Piers within an inch of his life, wanting for someone so hilariously out-of-his-league that he really ought to be grateful Piers so much as deigned to consider him a friend.)
By the time he snaps out of his brooding thoughts, Piers has already moved to the sink to splash some water on his face, making him look a little bit more alive but rendering his eyeliner that much more of a lost cause. “You probably oughta fix that, too,” Gordie points out, tapping just under his own eye in indication. “There should be a spare thing of liner in the cabinet you can use.” (A particularly passive-aggressive extended family member had sent it, among other makeup items, to Gordie not long after he came out. His mum had been furious enough that she’d given him full permission and even active encouragement to toss the whole package out, but he’d figured it was worth keeping at least a few items for Piers to use when he stayed over. After all, he could think of no bigger fuck you to his less-tolerant relatives than letting their gift be used by his equally-gay, equally-trans, anarchist-punk-rock best mate.)
Piers blinks at him and turns to look at himself in the mirror, appearing legitimately taken aback by his own appearance. “Shit, yeh,” he agrees, wiping at the mess of makeup with one hand and rooting around the cabinet with the other. Gordie fidgets while he reapplies the dark liner, torn between not wanting to stare and very much wanting to stare (seriously, it’s fascinating the ease with which he jabs a stick that close to his eyes, which is absolutely the only reason he’s tempted to stare and no one can prove otherwise).
When he’s done, he turns around and simply poses in Gordie’s general direction, and it takes him an embarrassingly long time to catch on that Piers is asking if he looks all right. “Yeah, yeah, better,” he nods, scratching at his arm in embarrassment. (Really, what he would give to have just one basic human interaction where he doesn’t feel like a useless arse.) “Um… you should probably head out first. Like… it’d probably be weird for us to just, walk out of the bathroom together, right?”
“Only if we make it weird,” Piers smirks, starting to catch on to their usual bant again in a way that makes Gordie’s chest instantly lighten. He does follow Gordie’s advice regardless and head for the door, but pauses again just before opening it. “...Gord? I really meant it. You’re a real mate, man. Best I could ask for, probably. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Gordie mumbles. He doesn’t trust himself to look as Piers walks out, politely shutting the door behind him.
(If Gordie takes a few more seconds to compose himself before following, well, he’ll say it was for propriety’s sake. Giving Piers a head start or something.)
“You missed the whole episode!” Zuzu wails as he and Piers walk back into the living him, reminding him all too quickly why he’d gone after Piers in the first place. “Snom was trying to throw a party for all her friends, but she ate all the ice cream before the party started, and—”
“Ohhh my god, Zuzu, I know, you’ve made me watch every episode.” He sinks heavily onto the far end of the sofa, and Piers settles much less dramatically between him and Marnie. “Just one more after this, all right? You know mum doesn’t like you watching the telly all day.”
“If you let me watch two more, I won’t tell mummy you left me and Marnie alone,” she counters back, much more coolly than a four-year-old has any right to.
He grimaces. Fuck, it is absolutely unfair that she’s old enough to know how to blackmail him but not old enough to have outgrown marathoning Snom and Friends. “All right, fine. But I’m turning the telly off after that, and if you still throw a fit, I’m telling mum you were naughty and shouldn’t get dessert.”
“Deal.” She settles back into the couch, looking disgustingly smug for a toddler, and they all sit in comfortable silence as the theme song rolls again. Or, at least, mostly comfortable silence — he risks a glance out of the corner of his eye, and sure enough, Marnie has fixed Piers with a very pointed stare, enough that Gordie feels his skin crawl even though he’s not the recipient this time.
“I think maybe lunch didn’t agree with me,” Piers says, almost too quietly to hear, in reply to Marnie’s unspoken but very-apparent question. “I’m sorry for leavin’ you alone for so long.”
Her little eyes narrow with such undisguised suspicion that Gordie swears he feels his heart stop a second. “You’re lying,” she says without preamble. “I can smell smoke on you.”
Piers lets out a heavy sigh, twisting his face up into a tired, apologetic grin. “Yeh, alright, you caught me. Sorry, Marn, I shouldn’t have lied. I won’t sneak any more smokes, I promise.” She stares another long moment, then nods, apparently satisfied, nestling into Piers’ side to keep watching the telly with visible half-interest.
Gordie moves his gaze up to Piers’, and he gives a little subtle shrug, a what are you gonna do kind of look. It’s astounding, even scary, how easily he gives himself up to hide the bigger truth of the matter for Marnie’s sake.
He slings an arm casually over the back of the sofa and gestures for Gordie to move closer, and he dutifully does so, even knowing his face is heating up and sitting so close will be little help to his uselessly pining for something (someone) he can’t have. He wonders, for a moment, if Marnie really knows what a great big brother she has.
...yeah, he decides after a moment. Yeah, she probably does.