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For once in her life, Lex was taking a leaf out of her younger sister’s book and focusing on exactly one thing and nothing else. It was a real godsend that Hannah’s braids had gotten so messed up because it was giving her something to do, over and over again because she kept messing it up because she wasn’t good at doing braids because it was always Ethan that did this in the mornings but he couldn’t do it right now because he was unconscious and covered in blood and he might not wake up and Lex didn’t know what she was gonna do without him and Hannah wasn’t speaking at all and Lex might think she was asleep if she didn’t keep making those little sniffle-sobs that sounded so awful .
The whole world had gone to shit this morning, and there were too many pieces for Lex to pick up on her own. She needed someone to help her. She needed Ethan .
Instead, she got Mr. Houston, the douchebag that got her kicked out of high school (actually, it was her mom’s fault, but she was pissed right now and she needed someone to blame who wouldn’t slap her about when she did), fiddling with his rearview every couple minutes and shooting her pitying looks as he drove them to the other edge of town.
Fuckin’ asshole.
Hannah rocked away from her slightly and Lex gave up on the braids. It was fine. Ethan could redo them when he woke up. (If he woke up.) She combed through the hair with her fingers a few times to de-tangle and undo the half-finished braid she had managed.
“It’s gonna be okay, banana.” It had to be.
Hannah said nothing.
---
Tom was good in a crisis. Side effect of military training, he supposed. He hates that he had to leave Tim to Paul, riding in the car behind because there was never going to be any separating the kids currently getting worrying amounts of blood all over his backseat and he needed Emma for directions.
“Turn just up here,” said his sister-in-law, which was a good distraction for the sudden cry from behind him.
“Ethan! C’mon, asshole, open your eyes again… can you say something?”
“Motherfucker…” was followed by a half-sob-half-giggle from Lex.
“Hey, no, wait, stay awake, okay? You need to stay awake.” Tom glanced in the rearview again. Ethan was, as suggested, shifting slightly.
“Hannah? She… fuck, is she-”
“She’s fine, she’s right here, right, Han?”
“Hey… banana. Lex, ‘r’you…”
“No, no, awake, c’mon. I’m fine, too. You’ve got another concussion, though, I think, you gotta stay awake.”
“Hurts.”
Tom’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. He didn’t much fancy thinking about what Lex meant by ‘another concussion’, but it wasn’t looking like he had much choice. How long had these kids been dealing with shit like this? How long had Ethan’s first instinct been to ask after a little kid instead of asking for help?
“Yeah, I know. Uh, hey, what do we need to enrol Hannah in school when we get to Cali?”
What.
“Proof, uh, proof of residence… medical records, uh, ID, birth certificate.”
“Yep,” Lex sniffled.
“Blood type A positive. Y-you’re, um, AB negative… ‘m… ‘m…”
“B positive, babes.”
What kind of teenage couple knew each others’ blood types?
“Yeah, that one. What’s the first thing we're gonna do when we get there?” The car jostled and Tom winced at Ethan’s pained grunt. Hannah let out a whine.
“S’okay, banana, ‘m’okay. Just a few bruises. Promise. Just gotta rest up a bit before California, yeah? We’re gonna… we’ll go t’the beach…”
“Yeah…” Tom glanced back again, and watched Ethan give Hannah a lackluster fistbump. Lex kept murmuring questions to keep him awake. In that moment, it felt like the same as keeping him alive.
“We’re almost there, just up this next turn.” Sure enough, as Emma spoke, a house came into view, behind a set of enormous electronic gates.
Emma got out to reason with the professor guy, and the conversation in the back quieted down. Tom still caught snatches, what colour they were going to paint their apartment (blue and green, like the sea, and purple for Hannah’s room), what updates needed to be made to their CVs (add the references from the mechanic shop, get one from ‘Frank’, “No, Ethan, he’s… they killed him”), which clothes they’d bother with taking considering the change in climate. It scared him, a little, how well-thought out this plan was. He knew what pushed people to plan that sort of thing. He hated the idea that that applied to Lex and Ethan.
“Hey, Hannah-banana, can you do me a solid? Me and Mr. Houston need to help Ethan, so can you stick with the nice lady with the scarf? We can trust her.”
Tom didn’t hear any kind of acknowledgement from Hannah but she left the car to join Emma and a tall man in a blazer. He focused on getting Ethan out of the car as gently as possible. Lex had a better way of doing it than he ever could have thought up. It gave him the unsettling impression that they’d done this before.
“Okay, red areas?”
“Bad arm, uh, ribs good side…” Ethan wheezed dangerously.
“Take your time,” Lex reassured him but her voice had tightened and her hands were fidgeting with her hoodie. She was worried, now, more than she had been. Something to do with the bad arm?
“Stomach. ‘S the worst.”
“Okay, orange?”
“Everywhere else?” Both teens managed half-hearted smiles. Tom grimaced.
“Okay, on three?” Ethan and Lex both nodded. “One… two… three!”
Heads turned, literally, at the litany of curses that Ethan spat out as they moved him. Tom faltered, for just a second, but Lex kept dragging until he was on his feet, leaning heavily against her and shaking violently.
“Breathe,” she murmured quietly. “Keep breathing, it’ll fade. C’mon, just keep breathing.”
Ethan kept breathing. Becky appeared behind them, Tim and Paul in tow. Tim had a steady grip on Paul’s jumper, face pale and eyes wide as he stared at Ethan. Still in his pyjamas, or maybe he changed back into them at some point. Tom made a mental note to ask, later, once he’d… once everything was done.
“Your bad arm…” Tom tuned back into the teenagers’ conversation, hoping to glean some more clues.
“S’fine… high up, ‘m’okay.” Lex relaxed by a fraction and they fell back into silence.
---
Becky had not been hopeful about Ethan Green’s recovery when she first saw him, lying in a puddle of blood, barely moving, on the floor of Lakeside Mall Cineplex. Now, provided with an unusual amount of medical supplies and a bed, things were looking up.
Lex Foster had sat down at the side of the bed, one hand gripping Ethan’s (“Th’one’s fine, didn’t get... stomped ‘n too hard…”), watching Becky carefully since her boyfriend was laid down. It was almost sweet, if not a little intimidating, but Becky was professional, so she did her job, winced in sympathy as she set Ethan’s arm without any painkillers, and didn’t think too hard about the way he barely made a noise.
“Well, it’s looking much better, I have to say. Is there anything else that hurts?”
“Ribs. His, uh, left side.” Lex hadn’t spoken a word up until this point.
“One ‘f’em’s broken,” Ethan clarified. “Others jus’... jus’ bruised.”
Becky blinked. “Oh… okay. Would you mind if I took a look?”
She would have been blind to miss it, the way Ethan’s hand tightened around Lex’s and her eyes snapped back to Becky, wary and defensive. After a moment, Ethan smiled tightly and nodded, settling his head back and fixing his gaze on the ceiling.
Becky tried to be as quick as possible.
---
Hannah was trying really, really hard not to freak out. She really was. Lex had asked her and Lex was really worried because Ethan was hurt like the time he had to sleep in his car but worse and if Hannah had a freak out everything would get worse. Except Hannah was super tired and she was meant to be at home pretending to sleep while Mom yelled at Lex, not in a strange house on the edge of town surrounded by strangers.
Webby said it was safe and Webby didn’t lie but Lex was letting the bad lady with the needle take Ethan away and Hannah had to get in a car with the scary angry man that Wiggly had tricked and now all of their friends were in this house with her and there were so many people in one place and Hannah couldn’t breathe in big crowds and-
Hannah pushed the white door open and dashed into a new room, one hand flapping as hard as she could get it, the other already between her teeth.
“Oh, hello.” The man with the white hair was standing at a big desk, looking at her. Hannah ignored him because how could she do anything else when there were giant glass boxes of spiders .
There were three terrariums in the man’s science room and Hannah was pretty sure they were for three different species, which was so awesomely cool she figured out her breathing again without really having to think about it. The terrarium closest to her contained three - no, four round, spiky spiders, crawling over rocks and a twig. Hannah watched one slowly link together the main structure of its web, closer together at the center. An orb-weaver.
“So,” and Hannah jumped clear out of her skin because she hadn’t noticed him move but he was suddenly right there, “do you know what kind of spiders they are?”
Wild Card. Careful.
Hannah gulped. “Gasteracantha,” she managed.
The science man smiled wide at her. “Very good! How about these?” Smiling was good, right? It meant happy, but sometimes it meant tricks.
“Diving bell? Argyroneta aquatica.”
“Very clever. Do you like spiders?”
Hannah nodded. The scientist man seemed nice. She didn’t know what ‘wild card’ meant but Webby had a tendency to be cryptic. “Arachnids,” she said, because spiders were nice and she wanted the science man to know she wasn’t stupid.
“Ah, wait a moment!” The science man dashed away to hunt through his really messy - seriously, why wasn’t anything organised? - and emerged again after an “Aha!” with a book in his hands.
“Here you are.”
Spiders of the American Continent .
Hannah took it. It was heavy.
“It’s an optional textbook for the college’s botany course,” the science man explained. “Mostly for the pest control part, but I just think it’s interesting. You can take a stool and sit by the terrariums if you’d like.”
Hannah just sat on the floor. The heating vent for the middle terrarium was right there anyway and she didn’t want to waste time on a stool with a whole gigantic spider book right there.
Wild Card went back to his microscopes.
---
Emma was getting very weirded out by how good the men in her life were with kids. She definitely hadn’t expected to be spending her morning questioning her complete lack of maternal instinct but Paul was full of surprises.
It was a good thing, a lifesaver, really, because she certainly had no idea how to cheer up a half-orphaned nine-year-old after his dad completely abandons him for no obvious reason. Paul, on the other hand, just asked about his video games and ten minutes later was engaged in a very intense round of Super Smash Bros. Emma stuck to making eggs and bacon (a big hit with all ages) and reading the next chapter of her textbook. Eventually, Tim was cheered up enough to play Monopoly and turned out to be a brutal little savage at it. Paul was bankrupt in half an hour, leaving Emma and Tim to battle it out for three more moves before she followed suit.
Of course, that was when they realised it was three in the afternoon and Tom should have been back. It all went downhill from there.
Now, she was watching a very suspicious teenager order around her biology teacher, who, in the space of a half-hour, had managed to calm down this ‘Hannah’ kid from about-to-explode to half-asleep. Emma was kind of impressed. Especially given some of the things Tim had said about her; apparently she was in special ed for some reason, which couldn’t have made anything easier.
Lex finally emerged from the room her not-quite-dead boyfriend was in and made a beeline for the backyard. Emma looked around the room. Tom was trying to extricate a semi-conscious Tim from Paul’s lap, Becky was taking a quick nap, Charlotte and Ted were dealing with the Wiggly cultists that they’d managed to rescue from the fire (against everyone’s better judgement), and Hidgens had immediately retreated back into his lab to avoid talking to anyone.
That left Emma to make sure the remaining minor on the premises was okay. God damn it, it was freezing out there.
Lex startled when caught with the joint but did relax slightly when she realised it was Emma. She wasn’t sure if she should be thankful or offended - did she not count as an authority figure? - but she did her best to smile not-awkwardly.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” They lapsed into silence. “D’you want some?”
Emma considered the ethical ramifications of smoking weed with a teenager. Then she remembered the day she’d had. “Sure. Thanks.”
It was decent pot, actually. “Where’d you get this?”
“Can’t remember. Sorry.”
They smoked in silence for a few more minutes, just watching the stars.
“So,” Emma began, “are you… holding up okay? With everything?”
Lex managed to convey exactly how stupid she thought that question was in one look.
“Yeah, okay, well, someone had to check on you.”
“And you drew the short straw, right?” Lex flicked the ash away. Emma groaned.
“I’m not… that’s not what I meant. Just… look, I’m not good at this, I just wanted to see if you were okay, okay?”
Lex gave a sarcastic thumbs up. “Fine and dandy, ma’am,” she said, interrupted by a yawn. “Ugh, fuck, I’m exhausted.”
“Go get some sleep, then.” Lex shook her head.
“Can’t. Gotta keep waking Ethan up. He’s got a concussion, so, y’know, once an hour on the hour and all that.”
“I’m sure someone else could manage it.”
Lex scoffed. “Yeah, except I don’t trust anyone in there to do it properly except that nurse lady and Hannah’s scared enough as it is. I’ll be fine, I just need some coffee.” Emma was just… going to ignore the bundle of psychological issues that was. Someone else could deal with it, later.
“Want me to fix you some? Professional barista, one time offer.”
Lex snorted. “Sure, but only if you make it strong.”
She was not as much of a little shit as Emma had first assumed.
“You got yourself a deal.”
---
Mr. Houston’s sister-in-law made pretty good coffee, as it turned out. Lex sat down at the other end of the kitchen island and did her best not to eavesdrop on Mr. Houston’s conversation.
“So. Jane.”
Nope, she was one hundred percent focused on her game. She positioned another turret and watched the trolls die under its vengeance.
“I miss her. Like crazy, I can’t… I still forget sometimes, you know?”
“Yeah, I sometimes… I’ll wake up and I’ll expect her to be there, when I roll over, but…”
“She never is. I keep going to call her, or text, when someone does something funny in class, and then…”
“You remember.”
“Yeah.”
Lex didn’t want to think about this. Why did she even have to ever fucking see him again? Couldn’t she have gotten away with one thing? She needed someone to blame and he was conveniently gone and it was easy to cuss him out with Ethan at two in the morning when she felt like the biggest failure on the planet. It was just her luck that he’d show back up and start crying about his stupid fucking dead wife five damn feet away.
“I… it was my fault. If I hadn’t been driving, she would’ve… she would’ve seen the other car, I’d bet.”
There’s a long pause before Emma replies. “It’s mine, too. I mean, if I’d come home once in a fucking while, who knows? Situation might’ve never arose.”
If Ethan didn’t make it, was that on her? She’d been the one who asked him to take care of Hannah; if it weren’t for her he’d never have been in that cineplex in the first place.
She couldn’t do this.
She couldn’t breathe .
Her chair clattered slightly as she got up. She didn’t notice. She just needed to get some fresh air or… something. Probably. Unless she was having a heart attack, no, she didn’t have time for that, someone needed to take care of Hannah and wake up Ethan in like twenty minutes. She just. Okay, she was just going to open the door and her hand was gonna stop shaking because she’s holding the door handle so tight her knuckles are kinda translucent, which is weird, why did knuckles do that? Hannah might know, if it had something to do with spiders.
It probably didn’t.
Lex didn’t know how much time passed between her getting outside and the end of the hour, but her face was wet when her phone buzzed.
Ethan, right.
She was breathing steadier (read: she wasn’t wheezing around nothing anymore), so she made her way back inside to wake him up.
“Ethan?” She shook him carefully. “Wake up, you jerk, we both know you’re not a heavy sleeper.”
He groaned. “Lex?” She waited for a few seconds to make sure he was focused. “Lex, hey, what’s up?”
“What?”
“You’re crying.” She wiped at her face hurriedly.
“S’okay, I’m just a bit stressed.”
“Lex, talk to me. C’mere, Hannah already decided it was cuddle time.” He gestured to Hannah, curled up on his other side, little hands grabbing at his shirt, about as close as she ever got to anyone. Lex felt her eyes start to sting again.
“You have a broken rib.” She hated the way her voice wobbled.
“Do I look like I give a shit about that right now? C’mon.” He tugged her down gently onto the bed with him. She was mindful not to jostle him as she lay down.
“It’s fine, I just… I was worried about you.” It wasn’t a total lie.
Ethan gave a mocking gasp. “About li’l ol’ me? I’m flattered, truly.”
“Shut up,” she muttered into his shoulder, “you’ll wake up Hannah.”
He pressed his lips against the top of her head and of course that was the thing that broke her. She tried to catch her breath but it wasn’t working and she didn’t have time for this because Ethan was hurt and one of them had to have their shit together.
“Lex, breathe, it’s okay, c’mon.”
“I-I’m sorry, I sh-”
“Talking and breathing don’t happen at the same time” - he grabbed her hand - “breathe with the squeezes.”
“I c- I can’t.”
“Yeah, you can. You breathe all the time, even I can breathe and I’m, like, the dumbest person on the planet. You can do it, just concentrate.” Lex managed a wheezy laugh. It was as good a starting point as any.
They carried on like that for a while, just breathing together, until Lex felt a second set of arms wrap around her waist.
“Don’t cry,” said Hannah. “California. California soon.”
Lex stroked her hair and tried not to start crying immediately. “Yeah. Yeah, California soon. You know, you are the best sister in the whole wide world, Banana.”
Hannah shook her head and poked Lex’s shoulder. Ethan grinned sleepily at both of them.
“Best little sister, then.”
---
It was a month and a half into Paul’s ‘thing’ with Emma that he first encountered her sleep deprivation habits. He’d gotten off from work and was greeted by an unexpected request to pick her up from Beanie’s. Still, he’d been excited to see her and not too concerned by the odd request until he got there.
Sleep-deprived Emma had been on the verge of passing out, chugged black coffee like it was water, and insisted (very sleepily) that Paul drive her to her lecture.
Paul had not been entirely convinced that doing anything other than going to bed was a good idea, but Emma had very persuasively pointed out that if he didn’t drive her she would have to drive herself, give or take calling him a bitch a bit more than was strictly necessary.
Which was how Paul met Professor Hidgens, under the worst possible circumstances for a good first impression, with his star student slumped against him and still drinking coffee.
“Go to bed, turn the paper in by Sunday, and ask for an extension next time ,” had been his instructions for Emma. He had only a very suspicious glare for Paul, before slamming the door to his lecture hall shut and beginning the class eight minutes early.
“Think he likes you,” Emma had mumbled, still half-asleep. Paul had had his doubts.
Lex reminded him of that and the few more times he’d had to put her to bed at three in the afternoon after some nasty all-nighters. A little more overtly growly, maybe. Ethan was doing an excellent job of preventing a homicide given his injuries. Although, it might have helped that every time he so much as tried to get himself a glass of water, Lex immediately dropped her murderous plotting in favour of snapping at him.
“The mother demanded it of us,” said the Wiggly cultist. Paul didn’t roll his eyes because Emma was doing that enough for the both of them, but he was sorely tempted. He settled for squeezing her hand. She’d said she was fine when they’d found out that the ‘mother’ all the cultists were mourning was her cousin, insisted that it didn’t matter, that she hadn’t seen her in years, but Paul didn’t quite believe her just yet. Emma didn’t like to be open about that sort of thing, not in public.
“It makes sense,” she pointed out. “Linda always wanted to be… followed, I guess, worshipped. Even when we were kids. Not to mention she fucking hated her husband. She would’ve been perfect for a… an evil doll that needed a cult leader. That’s still weird to say.”
Lex looked up from her seventh coffee like it had just insulted her little sister. “Are you seriously fucking telling me,” she began, “that this whole situation could have been avoided if your psycho cousin had gotten into BDSM?”
The room went completely silent, broken seconds later by Ethan’s loud snort.
“What? That’s, like, the whole fucking point, I swear.” Paul glanced at Emma. She looked… exactly like someone picturing unpleasant things would look.
“She makes a fair point,” said Hidgens from the kitchen, far too knowingly.
No one had had enough sleep for that image.
“Would anyone else like a cocoa?”