Archive of Our Own

Merriell is a child when he discovers his family’s quirk. 

He’s also a child when he first meets Eugene Sledge. 

Technically speaking, it’s from his mother’s side, but that doesn’t particularly register to a seven year old lost in the middle of a town he isn’t familiar with while the sun is beginning to set and there’s a boy crying on the sidewalk, clutching at his knee, who’s nearly as lost as he is. Well, maybe not quite so lost, because the boy, fair and dressed in a bright, starched new shirt and shiny black shoes looks like he belongs here in this town of big houses with neatly trimmed gardens more than Merriell, in his worn down second-hands ever could. 

There aren’t any people around that Merriell can see, store fronts closed up for the day, and the lowering sun casts long stretching shadows, shading the streets with a growing darkness that makes the boy shudder, his eyes large and frightened. 

You’re lost”, Merriell points out helpfully, and the boy shoots him a sour look that’s weakened by his flushed cheeks and the wetness in his eyes, his bottom lip quivering. 

“Yeah, well so are you”, he spits, though he can’t possibly know that. 

“You don’t know that”, Merriell says, sitting down next to him on the sidewalk and eyeing the shiny coin he sees a little further away, silver and glinting in the dying sunlight.

He is lost, of course. He doesn’t know anything about Mobile, Alabama other than there’s a doctor that his mother had wanted to see and that it’s full of people with too much money and stupid, fake looking smiles that glance at his and his maman out of the corner of their eyes when they think they aren’t looking, mouths uttering words too quiet for him to make out, but that set his mother’s teeth on edge. With the way she’d been holding onto his hand, he’s surprised to be as lost as he is, but then, he doesn’t think she’d counted on him wandering off while in a strange town. 

She always did underestimate his curiosity. 

“I’ve never seen you before, so that means you’re new and that you’re lost”, the other boy says, petulant and smart and wanting to embarrass Merriell for finding him crying in the street in a place he was supposed to be familiar with. Merriell shrugs, not feeling the burn of humiliation the way he would if it were someone back home trying to bully him for being poor and weird, because this boy doesn’t know how to crawl under skin the way the school children in Louisiana do. 

“So what that I’m lost? If you know this place so well, what’s your excuse?” Merriell snipes back, tempted to stick out his tongue but only just refraining. The tongue was for stupid adults who called his family means things even though they were supposedly supposed to know better. 

The boy scowls for all of five seconds before his eyes go all wobbly and his mouth trembles and he’s crying again, full body sobs that shake his tiny frame and Merriell- Merriell is mean and rude and often angry, but this kind of crying, the genuine kind, makes his chest tug and his heart squish and he doesn’t like it . 

“Hey, stop it, it’s okay, your maman’s gonna come looking for you soon enough”, Merriell says, a little stiffly because comforting people isn’t quite his thing . 

He presses a hand on a bony shoulder, rubbing his hand along his arm like his maman does to comfort him (more accurately, she rubs his spine but Merriell doesn’t want to crowd him, not feeling comfortable with it), and it seems to work well enough, the boy's sobs fading into hiccups. He rubs snot from his bright red nose, green-brown eyes shiny and tinged with red. Little locks of hair-turned flame fall into his face, messy as they tumble out of gel that had swept them back. 

“S’not just that”, the boy mumbles, wet glare aimed at the pink tinted cement, bottom lip stuck out in a pout. 

He pulls up the leg of his khaki shorts to reveal an angry red scratch, oozing a vibrant trail of blood onto the pale skin around it. Merriell winces, hand brushing against his own knee in sympathy, and the boy’s tears make a lot more sense than simply being lost in a place he already knows. 

“Ouch”, Merriell says, and without thinking, he places his hand over the raw, scraped skin before the redhead has a chance to do anything more than screech a warning to not do that. 

They both stare a little blankly as Merriell’s palm grows warm and glows a gentle green, the same seafoam of his eyes and slowly, the scrape melts away, leaving the skin soft and new, as if the scrape had never been there. Merriell snatches his hand back, staring at his little palm and feeling his breath speed up, the pale skin of his palm meeting his gaze as if nothing strange had had happened. There’s sound rushing in his ears, like he’s put seashells over them, trying to listen to the sound of the ocean, but that doesn’t make sense because there are no shells here in the the little rich-person part of Mobile Alabama, and his chest feels all funny, like it’s having trouble accepting the air that he breathes in, too tight, his throat zippered close. He blinks. The blink must last longer than it's supposed to because when he stops blinking, the back of his head hurts and his eyes are on the blue-turning-pink sky, wispy clouds painted along at the edges of his vision. 

He thinks they’re clouds, anyways, but they keep pulsing and make his head hurt . See if he ever helps anyone again if it feels like this. 

“Hey! Wake up, you can’t die on me! They’re gonna think I killed you or something!” The little red haired boy is shaking his shoulder with what Merriell would call excessive force. 

“Stop it, that hurts”, he grumbles, muffling a groan as he sits up again, head pulsing at the same rhythm of his heart. Boo, he thinks, that hurts . 

“What… what are you?” the red haired boy- he looks like a fox, actually, Merriell thinks distractedly- asks, still shaky, still wet-eyed, but a little less sad looking. 

“I’m Merriell?” Merriell answers, because he’s not exactly how to answer “what” he is (if it’s not fairly obvious that he’s a person? Duh?), but “who” he is is fairly easy. The fox boy frowns, but doesn’t push it, pulling back into his own space. Merriell kind of misses the warmth that his closeness brought. 

“Eugene Sledge'', Eugene informs him very seriously, stretching his hand out for Merriell to shake. Merriell takes it firmly in his, like his auntie taught him to and takes his hand back onto his lap when they’ve shook. His head hurts a little less now, but he feels unbearably hungry and he wants to go home, find his maman and make her explain what's happening to him. 

“I’m not actually sure what I did”, he admits after a pause.

Magic isn’t… a foreign concept to him. His maman grows flowers and his grandmere reads minds and his great grandmere did something that made her husband afraid and made Merriell’s grandmaere cut her off from the rest of the family, but he had always observed it from a distance. Magic isn’t for him, he’d never wanted it because it only ever seemed to bring trouble- his mind flashes with memories of older children bullying his cousins and how no man would ever look twice at his maman once they knew her name, would warn other men away.

Merriell knows he's already weird on his own, the kids at school had shown their opinion of him well enough and though he's usually fine with his own company, it stings to be the odd one out, the one pushed to the fringes and then pushed even out of there by the weird kids who consider him even weirder than them. 

His thoughts come to an abrupt halt when Eugene Sledge smiles at him. Eugene looks… nice, he thinks, when he's smiling, even with his face sticky and splotchy-red, snot dying under his nose, because the smile makes his eyes crinkle up, like they're smiling too and his face goes all soft and bright. Merriell looks away, eyes going back to the shiny little coin that had caught his attention earlier. It's not quite as shiny as the copper that the sun dances into Eugene's hair.

"Whatever you did, thank you. It stopped hurting", he says, confused but grateful.

"But we're still lost", Merriell points out, then grimaces when Eugene's mouth twists a little. It doesn't feel as good to make him frown when he's seen what his smile looks like, and that pours a funny feeling down Merriell's chest. He doesn't understand what it is, but he labels it "angry" for now. 

"Well, now that I feel better, I can go look an- and since you helped me, if you want, I can help you find your mama too", Eugene says, ducking his head a little. The splotchy blush returns. Merriell thinks it over for a minute, weighing the pros (more time spent with Eugene, a possible new friend, finding his maman) to the cons (spending more time with Eugene, possibly getting more lost) and comes to the conclusion that he honestly doesn't have that much to lose. Plus, he’s getting hungry. 

“Okay”, he agrees, standing up and brushing off his shorts. 

He holds his hand out for Eugene to take and though he thinks at first that Eugene won’t take it, he grins when his pale hand curves around his. Eugene grins back, brushing away his tears with the back of his other hand and tucking his red hair behind his ears again, though tufts of it stick up messily. Merriell picks up the silver coin and slips it in his pocket before nudging Eugene to lead the way. 

It’s a little darker now, and though it doesn’t normally bother Merriell to be out at night back home, the shadows of the unfamiliar town turn sharp and frightening to him, and subconsciously, he inches a little closer to Eugene, gripping his hand and trying to keep his heart from jumping into his mouth when the crickets begin to chirp. He still feels tired from whatever burst of magic that he’d used to heal Eugene, his legs aching,  and Merriell hopes that Eugene knows where he’s going because he’s just so. Ready to go home. 

“Where’re we goin?” Merriell asks, eyes tracing over the neat, pretty buildings shaded in pink and purple light, blue tinged shadows turning the world a little bit cold. Alabama in the morning, from what Merriell had seen, had been cast in shades of orange and yellow, made of rolling green hills and flowery fields, and while it had all looked pretty, it seems more lonely now. He assumes it’s because there’s no one about, and Merriell is more accustomed to the nightlife back home. 

“There should be an officer around here”, Eugene replies, his pace confident and quick as he guides Merriell along the sidewalk. Merriell grunts, frowning a little, but continues to tag along. 

They needn’t bother though, because it’s not long before a frantic woman scrambles around the corner, her eyes wide and fearful, brown hair spiking out of the neat confines of her bun,  and she only relaxes when she sees Eugene, her chest heaving with heavy breath, face lined starkly with stress. She cries Eugene’s name and Eugene cries back, letting go of Merriell's hand to run into his mama's arms, tiny hands clenching into his mama's flowery dress. Merriell hangs back, crossing his arms across his chest and watching mother and son reunite, an achy feeling in his belly, as if he were hungry even though he's not, and eventually his eyes skitter away, mouth pulled down as he searches elsewhere, trying to find the hint of familiar dark hair, the hems of an old but pretty green dress and feels his heart plummet when he can’t. 

Merriell genuinely doesn't know where his maman might be, and that scares him, but he doesn't want to show how scared he is in front of Eugene so his eyes greet the concrete of the sidewalk when he feels the burn of tears and tries to blink them back, scuffing his toe along where the grass grows through the cracks, the stems of fluffy, cottony dandelions bending beneath his beaten shoes. He doesn't like this feeling very much, and he wishes he could stomp it down as easily as he stomps down on the dandelions, green mulch sticking to the bottom of his shoe, and he clicks his tongue as he tries to scrape it off, ignoring the way his throat goes all sticky and thick around the sound. His cheeks feel a little warm and he blinks harder, feeling his mouth go all dumb and wobbly and he really really hopes that no one else sees the little drop of water that stains the sidewalk. Maybe they’ll think it’s raining. Again, Merriell wonders where his maman is. 

There's a pit of anxiety growing little thorns into his lungs, and it's making it hard to breathe again, and he wonders if he really could ever breathe at all because it seems like such a hard thing to accomplish right now that if someone had told him that he wasn't doing it right, he would have easily believed them. Where is his maman? She’s never left him alone for this long in strange place and it’s starting to make him think bad things, like what if she left him behind on purpose because she doesn’t love him anymore or what if she’s dead and he has no way to get back home (and even if he did, would any of his family take him in? Because he thinks they left because his maman was fighting with his grandmere over something and whatever it was made them both so angry and maybe it was his fault) or-

“Merriell?”

Eugene's looking at him now, and so is his mama, and they're looking at him like- like he’s crying or something which can’t, that can’t be right because Merriell Shelton ain’t no crybaby, no matter what his oldest cousins like to say and-

He touches his face. His hand comes away wet, and he can feel more tears welling on the corners of his eyes, spilling over messy and gross. His mouth twists, Merriell hates crying, it’s so sticky and irritating and gross and he feels sleepy and tired afterwards, makes his eyes feel itchy. He doesn’t trust himself to talk, lest he do something embarrassing like sob or ask for his maman. 

“He lost his mama too”, Eugene quietly tells his mother, a hand still curled into the hem of her skirt, and Merriell wants him to shut up, wants to lash out, but he can’t with his mama standing there and with his throat feeling like it’s all gunked up like a dirty sink drain. 

“Merriell? You wouldn’t happen to be Merriell Shelton , would you?” Mrs. Sledge asks with a tilt of her head, her expression calm and soothing. She’s pretty, Merriell thinks, in the way that all kind mothers are all pretty, her face soft and her mouth painted pinkish-red, her eyes round and hazel like Eugene’s. She doesn’t stare at him like he’s a stray that followed her son home, like he’s felt many of his friends’ parents back in Louisiana stared at him. 

He nods, chewing on his bottom lip and sticking his hands into his pockets, the hand curled around the coin clenching down to feel the scrape of its rough edges against his palm. 

“Oh, sweetie I know where your mama is”, she coos. 

Both boys stare at her in surprise and she grins, and it’s Eugene’s grin that makes her eyes crinkle and smile, gently brightening her face. She takes both of their hands (and Merriell notes that her hands are softer than his maman’s, whose hands are calloused from arduous factory work). He wonders if his hands feel rough and Eugene’s soft, and if it’s because of magic or because they work and Sledge's don’t. 

Eugene’s peaking at him, from the other side of his mama, curiosity gleaming in his eyes, and Merriell sticks his tongue out at him, wiping the remaining wetness from his eyes, face still flushed with embarrassment. Eugene retaliates by sticking his own tongue out, but he smiles afterwards, and Merriell feels that weird, warm, gushy feeling again, filling him up like he’s just drunk a rare cup of hot chocolate, sweet on his tongue, too hot in his throat and like a warm blanket that he can’t touch when he’s finished it. He doesn’t really notice that he smiles back until Eugene’s smile fades and his eyes widen a little before he turns away. Merriell doesn’t know what to make of it. 

He looks down at his hand, glowing faintly green, and doesn’t know what to make of that either. 

…

The heat of summer is much drier in Alabama. Though, just because Merriell is used to the humidity in Louisiana doesn’t mean he isn’t grateful for the persistent breeze that takes the sting out of heat, even if it’s more hot air than anything. 

“Are you excited?” Eugene asks for the tenth time that day, bouncing in place. Merriell nods his head dutifully, quietly holds hands with him and stares suspiciously at the little boy the honey curls who would be coming with them, only now introduced as Eugene’s oldest friend, Sidney Phillips. Merriell’s never met him before in the- what was it, five? Five years that he’s been going to the Sledge’s to visit his mother 

Granted, this would be his first stay that was longer than two days, and it’d be the first time he’d be spending time with Eugene outside of his home. He’s twelve now, and his maman thinks it would be good for him to spend more time with Eugene rather than spend all of his time by her side like he did during his brief visits in the past, and as much as he loves her, he rather agrees that he should get to spend more time with Eugene. 

He’s not quite sure how to feel about Sid yet, though. He seems okay, and he’d smiled politely when Eugene introduced him, but Merriell can’t help the prickle of self consciousness that dribbles down his spine as he and Eugene chatter on about things he doesn’t get, inside jokes that fly over his head, making him feel just a little left out. He doesn’t pout (he doesn’t!), but Eugene does seem to notice that he’s quieter than usual and tries to goad him into talking. And Merriell does try to talk, Eugene is his friend and he wants  to talk to him, but every time he feels like he might have a foothold in the conversation, Sid’ll say something that stops Merriell short but that makes Eugene giggle and Merriell doesn’t know how to respond so he just goes quiet again. 

There’s a frustration that lingers in his gut, a jealousy (that he won’t admit is jealousy) that tastes sour in his mouth, but he consoles himself with the knowledge that he’ll acclimate eventually and that Eugene isn’t doing this to him on purpose. Eugene isn’t like his classmates or the family members that don’t understand the quirks of his mother’s side of the family, and if he gives Sidney a chance, they could even be friends. According to his mother, anyways, doubtful as Merriell may feel about getting along with Eugene’s friend. 

How is Sid all that different from Eugene? His mother asks him in his head. 

I like Eugene , Merriell answers petulantly. And Eugene knows about his quirk and accepts it freely without thinking he’s weird or scary or whatever else the kids back home want to call him. Eugene is good, and that’s that. 

Sidney could be good too, the voice of his mother reminds him. Merriell stops listening to it and instead leans his head against the car window, wondering how much longer it would take to get to the pond, the scenery outside blending out into formless greens that doesn't mean much to his blurring eyesight. He’s just on the cusp of falling asleep when the car comes to a stop, and Eugene excitedly shakes his shoulder, imploring him to wake up, and his energy must be infectious because in little time, Merriell’s chasing him across the reedy field to the edge of the pond, surreptitiously avoiding the mud and hopping around the the dry edges of dirt. 

“If you boys want to go in, you’ll have to change”, calls Dr. Sledge from the car, and reluctantly, the tree boys trudge back to where they have all their things packed in the trunk. 

They’ve all navigated to the shallows of the pond by the time the second car arrives, bearing Mr. Philips and Mrs. Philips, Mary Frank, and Merriell’s maman, Dr. Sledge going over to help the ladies out and setting down a large blanket with Mr. Philips for the ladies to take a seat on. Though Ms. Shelton doesn’t know Mrs. Philips all that well, Mary makes sure to introduce the three of them warmly to each other, and it’s not long before they’re all three chattering amicably. Admittedly, chasing Sid thought the pond in a very wet game of tag isn’t as bad as Merriell had anticipated it to be and listening to the bell-chime of Eugene’s laughter is all the more worth it. 

While the pond isn’t all that deep, they’ve been warned well enough to only play in the very shallows, and none of them are keen on having their swimming rights revoked (and, though it’s not deep for the adults, it very much feels like an ocean to them- they're all on the shorter side of twelve)

Merriell finds that he’s easily the best swimmer, and while he glides through the water, Eugene and Sid stumble sluggishly through the mud to catch up to him, splashing Sid in the face when he gets too close and tripping Eugene up when he looks about to pounce. 

“Merry!” Eugene whines, “you’re such a cheater!” There’s a lisp in his tone from a tooth he’s lost recently, and his voice comes out a cracking squeak that makes both Merriell and Sid burst into laughter- until Eugene splashes them both, Sid sputtering indignantly and Merriell losing his balance in the water, splashing frantically to right himself again when he flips over in his shock and gets more water in his mouth. 

He feels a scrawny arm twine around his waist, hands grabbing at his shoulders and when he’s brought back out, his nose streaming and his eyes blurring, the back of his throat feeling like it’s been rasped with sandpaper. He coughs up water that had gone into his mouth and he shoots a pathetic glare at Eugene when he’s done, wet curls flopping into his face. 

“That was rude”, he drawls, ducking out of Eugene and Sid’s grip, splashing water at them both when they try to follow after him. He’s feeling ornery now, so he goes back to floating on the water but doesn’t pay them much mind, and he only feels more put out when they quickly seem to forget him and go back to chasing each other. He’ll stop being petty in a moment, he just wants to cool down in peace for a moment, and it only really takes a few minutes before he gets bored of being mad and goes back to playing with Sid and Eugene. They welcome him back eagerly (and he shouldn’t be surprised, Gene is good , and Sid isn’t nearly as bad as Merriell made him out to be in his mind, but he’s used to his peers pushing him away because he’s mean and cruel and weird- which, admittedly, he is, but only because people are mean and cruel to him first!)

“Oh shi- shoot!” Merriell shouts (correcting himself at the last minute because as much as he likes them, he doesn’t trust these people not to be scandalized at a little cuss word), when he accidentally ends up pushing Sid just a little too hard into the water. 

Sid yelps, at first in surprise and then in pain as his foot scrapes across a sharp rock, and he hobbles out of the pond as quickly as possible, Eugene and Merriell stumbling after him.

“I didn’t mean to!” Merriell insists, terrified that this is it, this is the thing that makes Eugene hate him. 

Sid waves him away, saying, “Yeah, yeah you’re fine, there usually isn’t any rocks in there.”

He looks like a kicked puppy more than anything, big blue eyes bright with tears, his bottom lip wobbly, and his blond curls flattened to his pale face. But while he looks upset, he doesn’t look angry, isn’t looking at Merriell like he’s stupid for pushing him or like it’s entirely his fault, and even though the cut on his foot looks kind of bad, he doesn’t complain much. 

“Should I…” Merriell turns to Eugene, wringing his hands together and letting his hands flash green out of Sid’s sight. Eugene is quick to cover them with his own hands, glancing down at Sid to make sure he hasn’t seen, and for a moment, Merriell fears anger and anxiety, that Eugene might not want him to be weird around his friend. 

“Are you sure? I don’t- you told me you got in trouble with your grandma because you used your powers on me, and I don’t want you to get in trouble again. It’s just a little cut, and my dad can take care of it”, Eugene whispers softly to him, squeezing his hands. Merriell blinks. 

“I could help him”, he hisses under his breath. 

“I know”, Eugene says, “but you don’t have to. Not if you’re uncomfortable with it.”

Slowly, Merriell puts his hands down, and Eugene lets them go with an understanding smile, not a hint of resentment in his hazel eyes. Sid doesn’t even seem to have noticed their little conversation, too busy poking at the cut on the sole of his foot, utterly fascinated by the blood that leaks from it. 

“C’mon Philips, let's get you patched up”, Merriell says, both him and Eugene helping him up. Sid grumbles that his name is Sid , and Merriell grins crookedly at him, and both he and Eugene stay out of the pond in solidarity, feeling sleepy anyways from the heat and exhaustion they hadn’t felt creeping up on them in the water. 

Merriell curiously eyes Sid, who falls asleep by himself on the grass, not bothering to join him and Eugene on their own picnic blanket, Merriell laying his head on Gene’s soft belly. His loss, he thinks, before chasing after Gene in his dreams. 

...

Alabama feels much colder than Louisiana does in the winter. At least, Merriell thinks it does because he swears he didn’t need this many coats layered over each other while he was waiting for the train in New Orleans. There’s no snow, but the grass beneath his feet crunches with iced-over dew and the weak rays of the morning sun do little to melt any of the ice he swears he feels forming on the edge of his nose, sniffling and huffing out white puffs of breath. He tries to warm his hands with it and finds that it does little to stifle the chill, so instead, he glances around, and when he finds that everyone is likely doing the sane thing and staying inside their warm houses, he lets his hands begin to glow and rubs them down his arms, sighing at the heat that sinks past his clothes and into his skin. 

If his grandmother saw him, she’d beat his ass into next Sunday, as if she and his mom didn’t constantly use their powers to spite the people back home, but she's not around and neither is his mom, so he can get away with it as long as no one sees him. 

Merriell’s thankful he has a sense of direction and knows how to read a goddamn map because it’s been a while since he’s last been to Mobile and he’s not quite sure anymore where the Sledge house is. The straps of his backpack sink heavily into his shoulders as he cuts through the streets, bright lights glittering through the windows of the homes he passes, pine needles hogging up all the space in others where a family has put their tree to show off crystal baubles and silver garland. Merriell thinks of the tree he helped set up for his grandma back home, a small but beautiful little thing that his cousins had decorated with things they had made themselves and wonders what it would be like to live like that, with everything so neat and pretty and put perfectly in place. 

…

Eugene thinks it’s silly that Sid would want snow when it’s cold enough outside without it. Well, he thinks it now, but he’d been just as guilty of excitement when it had snowed a few years back just enough for him and Sid to ball it up and throw it at each other before it began to melt, leaving the ground mushy and wet and leaving Eugene sick and red-nosed for three days afterwards. It had been worth it, to shove snow down Sid’s shirt even if he’d ended up with a facefull of it and a bad cold in return. 

They haven’t even been able to see each other because his father demanded so much of his attention ever since Mrs. Shelton began to live with them full time, her illness ramping up so that they either needed give her medical attention in Louisiana before she stopped being strong enough to make the trip, or she’d have to stay with them, so that Eugene’s father could give her the care she needed. She’d chosen to stay, not wanting her son to see her slowly deteriorate, and though his father said that he could maybe cure her of her ails with the right treatment, she didn’t seem to have much hope for it. 

Merriell’s supposed to be arriving to see her for Christmas. Eugene can’t quite stop thinking about it, though that’s nothing new anymore, Merriell made a little home for himself in his head when they were both small children and he’d healed his scraped knee. He’d come back every few months with his mother, and Eugene would be quick to pluck him aside and take him into his room to show him his new books, and though he’d always pretend not to care, he’d sit and eagerly listen to Eugene read to him. Eugene had felt bad that they couldn’t run around outside much because his mother was afraid that it would aggravate his heart, but Merriell had assured him that it was fine, the tall grass and pollen tended to trigger his asthma, though Eugene had never seen him have an attack. 

He has a stack of letters in Merriell’s messy scrawl in one of his desks, idle things like school shared between them, things like how much Eugene likes the stars or how Snafu hates the books they make them read in class because yeah, they're important or whatever, he gets the message and the books can be fun to dig into, but god are the other kids so pretentious about it, really would it kill them to see these books from his perspective to see how he comes to his conclusions about his interpretations as well as the authorial intent? Fucking idiots. Eugene grins; Merriell's books tangents have always been fun to read.

They’d write about less idle things too, like how Eugene doesn’t like girls as much as his brother does, and it kind of scares him and how Merriell misses his mother more than he can say sometimes (and how he knows what Eugene means when he says he doesn’t like girls as much as he should because he’s like that too, except he thinks its not that big of a deal, it’s not like girls talk to him anyways and Eugene has to answer back that it’s different here, that the pit in his stomach is formed by his fear of his mother not loving him or his father thinking that there’s something wrong with him, and surely that’s he case because what else could it be?) 

Merriell doesn’t write about his magic, much, and Eugene hasn’t really seen him use it since the day they met. Sometimes he wonders if it had been a figment of his imagination until he sees Ms. Shelton blooming flowers in the garden, her face pale and sickly with each rose she gives life too, as if she were sapping a piece of herself to give to the plants around her. He hopes that’s not the case, he doesn’t know what it would do to Merriell if his mother died. 

Eugene perks up when he hears a knock on his door, one of the housekeepers announcing to him that Merriell Shlelton’s here, and he doesn’t waste time jumping out of his chair and putting down his book to go downstairs to greet him, his heart lodging itself into his throat. 

Merriell is as birdlike as Eugene remembered him, slender and dark like the shadow of a swan, elegant without having to try, a grace that Eugene in all his coltish, teenage limbs doesn’t know how to achieve. His eyes, a chalky blue that is made more vibrant by the washed out sky behind him, glisten with mischief, the curve of his mouth pulled up into a familiar cat smile that evokes in Eugene the urge to do something troublesome. Merriell swings his backpack off of his thin shoulders, dropping it by the door and stretching his skinny arms above his head, closing his eyes to languish in his popping spine, the layers of his coats hanging loosely on his frame to give him the illusion of bulk. Eugene’s had a growth spurt since they last met, so he towers over him somewhat, the tip of his chin hovering above Merriell’s red nose. 

“Took you long enough to get here” he says, wrapping his arms around him and finding that despite the outside chill, Merriell feels pleasantly warm. 

“I’m a busy person! Not all of us can spend our holidays luxerinzing at home”, Merriell quips, unzipping his first jacket and unbuttoning the next, neatly hanging them on the coat wrack that Eddy jr always seemed to forget. Merriell’s nothing but jutting bones underneath it, underfed and overworked. “How’s my mom?”

His voice goes softer, the drawl of it like silk honey, and there's something in his eyes that Eugene can’t identify, that’s far removed from the normal glint of meanness he’s gotten used to seeing as Merriell’s defense, to protect himself. 

“Why don’t you go see for yourself?” Eugene asks, then, more tentatively, “maybe you could convince her that you can heal her now?”

Merriell looks down at his hands, still gloved with the worn but soft gray cotton of his gloves, feeling his magic thrum beneath the skin, deep in his bone marrow and vibrating in his blood, thinking about the last time he’d suggest that to his mother. 

“Absolutely not, Merriell”, she’d snapped at him, her pallid eyes glazed with fever and Merriell had asked why she wanted to die so badly, if she really hated him that much that she wouldn’t even let him help her. 

That had been… a bad argument, from what Eugene could remember, and that had only been the part that he’d understood. He’s not sure what they’d said to each other after they’d switched to French, other than that it had been said in short, hissed angry whispers that left the rest of Merriell’s visit strained. But Eugene knows they’re passed that (specifically because Merriell has yet to bring it up again and he’s not sure what his mother has against being healed by her son when he’s gotten so much better at it over the years, but he knows it’s not his place to say so he doesn't bring it up either). 

Merriell accepts his hand, when Eugene offers it, fingers twining together as they take the stairs to one of the guest rooms- Ms. Shelton’s room now that she’s stayed for so long, and Eugene can’t imagine anyone else taking it. Merriell hesitates at the door, throat bobbig when he swallows, and the long line of his spine is tensed, his narrow shoulders hunching tightly together. Eugene can read the fear in the lazy drawl of his voice when Merriell asks, “is she getting better?”

He wants a warning that Sledge doesn’t know how to give. 

“She’ll be happy to see you”, he says in lieu of a real answer, and squeezes Merriell’s hand. 

Eugene had always thought of Mirriam Shelton as beautiful, albeit a different kind than his mother. His mother is pretty in the way that all the girls in Mobile are pretty, her long brown hair pinned up, her skin pale and smooth like the undisturbed surface of a glass of milk. Her smile was perfectly polite and painted a natural pink, not a particularly tall woman, but could radiate her own sort of intimidating, disapproval when she scowls. Merriell’s mother is darker, like he is, her long hair tends to be loose around her angular face if not pulled back into a curly ponytail. Eugene had always thought her eyes were magical, because Merriell’s eyes were magical, identical shades of silvery seafoam that Eugene thought were particularly pretty. 

Merriell follows Eugene through the door and pauses just inside, his eyes finding his mothers’ and his heart sticking to his throat. Eugene squeezes his hand again and though Merriell doesn’t return the gesture, his shoulders relax the slightest bit, his mouth pressed into a tight line though he tries his best to turn it into a smile. At best, it’s a grimace. 

“Maman”, he greets without too much enthusiasm. 

“What’s with that look? Get over here and give your maman a hug”, Mirriam scolds, and finally, Merriell’s lukewarm reception melts into something sweeter, rushing over to throw his arm around his mother. 

They’ve always looked remarkably alike, but Eugene understands Merriell’s hesitation when his mother doesn’t quite look like herself, her complexion waxy and pale, the dark circles under her eyes looking uncomfortably like purple bruises. She’s cut her hair short, face framed with dark ringlets. She brightens up when Merriell embraces her, pressing a kiss into his curls and rubbing his spine, gentle and comforting. It almost makes Eugene feel like an intruder in their reunion, but he comes in anyways, a quiet smile gracing his mouth as he hums a soft hello, chucking when she pulls him into a hug too. 

“How are you?” Mirriam asks her son, appraising him with surprisingly sharp eyes, scanning the differences between now and the last time she’d seen him. He hadn’t changed all that much, hadn’t even had a growth spurt, but that doesn’t seem to bother her much as she ruffles her hand through his hair. 

“I’m good, my magic’s much stronger now that Grandmere’s been training me to exhaustion," he chuckles. He doesn’t ask to heal her and she doesn’t ask for it, but Sledge tastes a tenseness in the air that tells him that it’s for the best. He’s not keen on being witness to another argument between the two Sheltons. They don’t even stay long, Mirriam is too tired to hold much of a conversation and she’s falling asleep by the time they leave, her eyes growing dull with exhaustion. There’s obvious distress in Merriell’s expression and Sledge can see the soft glow of his eyes even if he keeps the glow away from his hands. He doesn’t even touch his mother as they leave, reaching to brush a curl out of her face and refraining at the last second. 

Something passes between them, Mirriam’s eyes flashing briefly and growing a ring of small blue flowers into Merriell’s hair before she properly passes out and the boys leave. 

“Let’s go to my room”, Sledge says, taking Merriell’s hand again, concern twisting in his gut at how sharply Merriell chews into his lip. Merriell doesn’t say much, but he doesn’t let go of his hand. 

…

There are times when Eugene feels like he knows Merriell like the back of his hand, a familiar thing that he could track blindly, and at times, Merriell appears as if a stranger to him, his features as foreign to him as the French that he speaks. He knows it’s because that when he’s feeling hurt, Merriell retracts into himself, a turtle dipping back into his shell to keep himself away from his pain. Seeing his mother most certainly triggered it, and being unable to help her aggravated it. 

“What is the point of these powers if I can’t use them?” Merriell asks, not for the first time. 

His eyes are bright bright green, glowing and vibrant and pretty. There’s sparks jumping in his palms and when he squeezes his hands into fists, it’s like his hands are gloved with green fire. Eugene knows that if he were to touch them, they would be pleasantly warm, more like the hearth than the rage of a wildfire. 

“Why don’t you think about something else for a bit”, Eugene suggests, and though Merriell flattens his mouth and glares at the wall, he doesn’t object, relaxing his hands and letting the glow die down, and it doesn’t escape Eugene’s notice that he’s copying his breathing, the rise and fall of his scrawny chest slowing into something more relaxed. 

They had met when they were seven years old, and Merriell had healed the little scrape on Eugene’s knee with powers he hadn’t really expected to have. Mirriam had come to Mobile, Alabama on invitation from her friend, Mary Frank Sledge, Eugene’s mother, because she had been ill and Mary had thought that perhaps her husband could help and she’d brought her son, not having anyone to watch him at the time. They hadn’t known what exactly her illness was (Merriell hadn’t even thought that she was sick at the time)- or at least, Edward sr.  couldn’t figure it out, Mirriam seemed to know exactly what it was but was hesitant about elaborating, embarrassment and grief and anger coloring her moods. Eugene is sure that Merriell still doesn’t know what it is making his mother sick, but from the eavesdropping that Eugene has done over the years (accidentally, at first), her body’s begun to reject her magic. 

Eugene doesn't know what that entails, but he’s sure it can’t be good. He’s not the one who comes from the magic family and he knows that he should tell Merriell, but he doesn’t feel that it’s his place. He doesn’t want to lie to Merriell either, though. 

As a child, Eugene had such a strange hate-love attitude towards Merriell, and he knows (now, after many, many hours… days… weeks of introspection) that it was because he’d had a little baby crush on him and, if Eugene is being honest with himself, he still has a crush on him. He likes when Merriell visits and he likes that Merriell seems to like him, doesn’t mind spending time with him, that he’s his friend. Merriell is a different kind of friend than Sid. 

They’re night and day, if he thinks about it, Sid with his blond curls and Merriell with his dark ringlets and Merriell is so much more… intimate. Merriell crawls under his skin in a way that Sid is too distant to try because Merriell doesn’t believe in barriers and Sid is just like Eugene, having grown up in the same stifled little town with much more traditional values than Merriell was used to. The presence of Merriell had loosened him somewhat, had made him feel like he could see past the veneer that made up the social niceties of Mobile. (That doesn’t mean he stops participating in them, when it’s just him it’s so easy to fall back on them, to be quiet-polite Eugene who reads books about medicine in hopes to be a doctor like his father and who looks at girls like Mary from church who wears pretty dresses because without Merriell to alleviate it, the pressure of Mobile’s social atmosphere is nearly crushing, makes his chest feel caved in and rubs his skin until he feels as raw on the outside as he does inside. Eugene doesn’t want to be a doctor and he doesn’t like Mary from church that way because she’s pretty, but not in the way that Merriell is pretty, doesn’t like her the way he’d liked Sid before Merriell had stumbled into his life with his big eyes and his glowing hands.)

Merriell feels bony and fragile where he leans against him on Eugene’s bed, Eugene sitting criss cross with a notebook on his lap while Merriell has his legs stretched out and hogging most of the space, eyes going over a book that Eugene knows he’s already read at least five times. It’s a comfort thing, he knows, a familiar story that he knows has a happy, satisfying ending that makes something like hope flicker in the space between Merriell’s rib cage, where he usually saves space for his love for his mother and Eugene and the few, rare other people who he’s grown to love because they somehow have the patience to wiggle past his prickly barriers. Eugene would have thought that book a little too naive for him, but he supposes that even Merriell needs a bit of escapism every once in a while. 

“How’s your grandma?” Eugene asks, his voice making a crack in the ambient quiet that had blanketed them. Merriell shrugs.

“She’s old. She’s mad that maman doesn’t want to be healed by us. She thinks I should stop visiting you and going to school to work on my magic studies, rather than wasting time with a woman rejected by her own quirk and people who are too blind to know our ways. You know how she is”, Merriell says with a wave of his hand, as if brushing the whole subject away. He hadn’t even looked up from his book. 

Eugene does not know what Grandma Shelton is like, actually. He’s never met her and Merriell and Mirriam only talk of her in passing, if asked, before changing the subject or muting themselves. He knows she’s strict, and that she’s the one who’s been training Merriell in his powers since they appeared when he was seven, his mother not having the strength to even consider it. He doesn’t even know what his grandmother’s quirk is supposed to be, and Merriell doesn’t have any pictures of her so Eugene doesn’t have even an impression of what she looks like. 

They settle back down into their usual almost-quiet, cracked only by the soft patter of the rain against Eugene’s window (he’s glad that Merriell arrived before it started, though it’s not a very heavy rain, he knows what it’s like to be pelted by a storm’s cold needle points in the winter and Merriell would have no doubt gotten sick if he’d tried to walk through it.) The clouds have shifted in color from the frosty blue-white of early morning into a petulant gray, and the lack of light turns Merriell’s eyes gunmetal silver, reflective enough to catch what little light there is. The house creaks quietly, the old wood of its walls swaying imperceptibly with the wind, just old enough to start shifting, but solid enough that they don’t even feel it, wouldn’t know if it weren’t for the faint groaning of walls. 

Eugene’s mother calls them for dinner some time later, and Eugene finds that Merriell’s fallen asleep, his square palm splayed over the page he’d been reading like a bookmark, slightly overgrown curls trickling into his face, and Eugene pauses to watch the slow rise and fall of his chest, long black eyelashes resting on the high bones of his cheeks. 

He should wake him, so they can go eat. 

He pushes a curl behind his ear, his heart jumping when his eyelashes flutter, though he doesn't wake. Soft breath puffs from his mouth, and Eugene can't stop watching him, his chest squeezing at the thought that Merriell trusts him enough to let him see him so vulnerable. Merriell doesn't trust easily. Eugene's seen it in the way he closes off when other people come over, sees it in the way his mask slips on around Eddy jr, how he turns just a more aloof and distant when Sid is around. He's known them since he was seven, but he isn't nearly as open with them as he is with Eugene. Merriell may well only be himself around Eugene, and that strikes a hungry greed in him to have that all to himself. Selfish?

Maybe. 

But Eugene rarely gets something so special to keep to himself, to hold tightly to his chest. With reluctance, he gently taps Merriell's cheek, watching avidly as his pale eyes flicker open, blinking once, then twice until they find some semblance of focus. They're dark blue in the evening, a reflection of the navy night. 

"Let's go eat", Eugene whispers, feeling like if he were to raise his voice higher, something in the fading light would end up shattering, though he's not quite sure what.

Merriell nods, placing his hand on his belly and grimacing at the pang of hunger that the words awaken. They climb out of bed, hand in hand, and head down for dinner.

…

"No", she says, just as Merriell thought she would. It doesn't lessen the frustration that simmers low and sharp in his belly, hands lighting with green sparks that he can't use because his mother won't let him.

"But maman, I can help. Grandmere’s shown me how to hone my powers, I’ve been healing people back home, and I- I don’t know what you have, but I know I can fix it” , Merriell argues anyways, because he has to try, he has to at least try to bully his mother into letting him heal her. It would be easier if she’d just tell him what was wrong, but she refuses to so much as give a hint, and it’s infuriating that she won’t let him do anything. 

“I said no, Merriell. Keep your magic to yourself, I don’t want it”, she says sternly, her eyes a flat, discouraging blue that makes Merriell feel cold inside. 

He’s been sensing a shift in her quirk for some time, but he doesn’t know what it means, or if it has something to do with her illness. (Grandmere says it does, because if the shift is so strong that it can be sensed even by a fledgling like him, then it must be big, like the shifting of plates that makes the world tremble). It makes him feel uneasy when he’s around her, makes her feel unnatural because her magic is simmering under her skin like it is in his, and it’s woven into them deeper than bone, marks their very souls with it, and for magic to reject its user is like the body rejecting its own heart. It must be unbearably painful for her, Merriell thinks. Not just mentally, but physically as well, the strain of it consuming her, her magic becoming a tumor where it was once as natural as blood. 

“Even if you could heal me, you would not be able to save my magic”, she says, confirming his theory (and plunging his heart into the pit of his stomach).

“I don’t want to watch you die”, he croaks, the ball of emotion that collects in his throat nearly choking. “Maman…”

“Then leave , Merriell. It is my choice, and that is final.” He voice lands like the lash of a whip, and whatever bit of magic that still obeys her lashes with it, scraping across Merriell’s nerves like ice, and he stumbles back, his eyes wide and his breathing labored. The flowers that his mother had grown in his hair earlier are frozen, thin, delicate petals crunching beneath Merriell’s fingers when he goes to touch them. His mother looks as shocked as he does, regret quickly filling her eyes with tears, but she doesn’t get a word out before Merriell’s whirling out, his eyes burning and his hand clenched into fists. He feels as if he can’t get air into his lungs quick enough and the flash of his mother’s magic grows parasitically in his throat, the spiny hands of ice that prick at his skin making it impossible to do more than wheeze in drafts of air. 

The door slams in Mirriam Shelton’s face, and she does not see her son again for the rest of the winter holidays. She does not blame him. Her own maman had probably never asked him to try to heal her because she would know that Mirriam does not wish to exist with the fluttering hum of magic beneath her skin and she wishes that Merriell could understand it too. He wouldn’t, though. He loves her more than he loves his quirk. 

She thinks that maybe that’s why he’d been given that quirk, because his family kept falling apart. His papa died and his cousins were all sick and even as a tiny boy, he’d been so desperate to keep them all from leaving him. So he would heal, and Mirriam, who wanted to see pretty things, would grow flowers, and her maman had been paranoid so of course she would read minds. But there were also the opposite sides of their quirks, the sides meant to hurt, meant to push people away. Her’s is ice, distant and painfully cold, her mother’s- the ability to crush someone in unrelenting darkness. Mirriam doesn't know what her son’s opposite is, and she hopes she doesn’t ever find out, because she knows that whatever the opposite of healing is- 

It won’t be good. 

Mirriam sighs, bowing her head, her hands clenching into the silken sheets of her bed, eyes wandering to the window, the panes blinded over with droplets from the rain and in the distance she sees the distorted wash of brown and gray that makes up the distant woods of the Sledge estate, the trees baren even from her blurred view. She doesn’t want to push her son away, she really doesn’t, but she thinks it may be instinctual, like the pull of her magic, drifting from her and making her drift in turn. 

At least he won’t be alone, she hopes, thinking of Eugene Sledge and the soft curve of his smile every time he looks at her son, the fond crinkle in Merriell’s eyes when they look at each other. They’re good for each other, a balance, a resonance between them that seems to magnetize them to each other. Or maybe she’s just seeing what she wants to see, because Eugene makes her son happy and there’s few things Mirriam wants more than to see her son happy. 

…

It’s the second night in a row that Merriell can’t sleep. It itches behind his eyes, taunting him and spiting him, eluding him every time he closes them, like his eyes are the moon and sleep is a tide ebbing away from them. It’s frustrating, and he’s so tired, his head aching with it. He sits up, swallowing roughly against the sandpaper in his throat and scrubbing the sleep from his eyes, sighing out a dissatisfied huff of breath as the moon continues it’s nightly journey through the sky, ever chasing the sun and only ever able to catch the reflection of its light.  The moon’s borrowed glow drips silver into his window, past the gauzy curtains and pooling on the polished hardwood floors, giving his room the soft sheen of a child’s fairy tail, the kind that his mother told him when he was little. 

He climbs out of the cloud of a bed, his head feeling like it’s been stuffed with cotton and placed on a stick-neck, ready to roll off if he tilts it too much to one side. Merriell hasn’t even been dreaming lately, and he doesn’t so much wonder what it is that’s keeping him awake as he wishes that it would go away and let him have peace , shoulders set in a tense, aggravated line. 

The door creaks softly when he slides it open, it’s old hinges protesting at him that it’s late and everybody’s asleep and he should be too, and as much as he’d like to tell them to shut up, he doesn’t, letting it shut with a  click behind him, the noise far too loud in the quiet hallway of the Sledge manor. He bare feet pad along the cold floor and he regrets not pulling a blanket over his shoulders before he’d left his room, but it’s not even that long before he finds himself in front of the familiar wood of Sledge’s door. Merriell pauses, unsure. It’s not like they haven’t shared a room before, especially when they were younger, but insecurity slithers into his belly and he isn’t sure whether to knock or if he could just come in, the face of the door seeming to judge him for his indecision. He places a palm against it, smooth and cold like the rest of the house, reddish brown and pretty, like it’s been carefully maintained despite being just one of many, many doors in the manor. 

Merriell blinks, shuffling his thoughts away and bringing his hand back for a quiet knock- 

Only for it to swing open, Eugene’s eyes blinking at him in surprise from the other side of the threshold, his hair ruffled from sleep and looking a damp red in the dark of the night, lit copper where the moonlight touches it.

“Hey”, Merriell says softly, a noise practically shocked out of him, and Eugene blinks back, eyes dark as coal in the darkness, his skin ghostly. 

“Hi”, he whispers back, shifting back to gesture Merriell in. Merriell hesitates for a second before 

Shuffling inside the warmth of Eugene’s room, feeling his breath puff lightly against his throat as he pass by.

“I couldn’t sleep”, Merriell explains, sitting at the table by Eugene’s writing desk, fingers tapping a soundless rhythm while his eyes anxiously skitter anywhere but Eugene and the curiosity in his expression. He’s not quite sure what he’s doing here anymore, bothering Eugene in the middle of the night and he swallows down the lump of emotion that’s settled in his throat ever since he talked to his mother. 

“I couldn’t sleep either. I was gonna go downstairs for some water”, says Eugene, his hand finding Merriell’s, and he doesn’t even know when he got so close, standing right in front of him. His hand feels soft, curled around his, little freckles dotting it at the wrist, and it’s a comforting weight that makes him feel a little more settled, that makes his shoulders feel a little less rigid. Eugene smiles at him, a little wan, but genuine, and his dark eyes crinkle gently. Merriell stares, and thinks, what kind eyes . 

They both wander downstairs, Merriell borrowing a pair of Eugene’s fuzzy socks that make the cold floor far more tolerable, one of his heavy quilts slung over both of their shoulders. They’re both still small enough to fit underneath comfortably, and between them, their hands stay clasped together. 

Merriell’s always thought of night as something like another realm, turning corners into dark portals, hiding creatures that can only be caught in peripheral, the cold touch of the sun’s absence lingering with the moon’s chilly breath, streams of pale, fragile silver light falling delicately through the windows and sapping the color form wherever they land. He feels like something other, like he’s one of the slithering shadows, another dark form born from the inky depths of the void. Eugene looks almost fae-like, a flittering, long-limbed creature that seems to steal all the light into himself, glowing softly from within. 

Eugene looks back at him and freezes suddenly, eyes widening slightly, peculiarly looking as if he’s been struck. Merrielly tilts his head, curious, but Eugene says nothing and pulls him into the kitchen, letting go of his hand and leaving him bereft of his touch. Merriell doesn’t say anything either. 

They don’t actually drink anything, simply sitting side by side on the floor, close enough to touch but not moving. Merriell’s eyes burn with exhaustion and with grief. 

“She still won’t let me heal her”, he says in a soft rasp, eyes going down to his hands where they sit laced together on his lap. 

“Why does she have to be so fuckin’ stubborn?” Merriell angrily wipes at his eyes, angry at his maman and angry at himself and angry at the world, the feeling of it licking inside him like the tongue of a flame. 

It calms when he looks at Eugene, whose expression is gentle and understanding, like a balm against his nerves. 

“Where do you think you got it from”, Eugene laughs softly, but not cruelly. Merriell scowls at him, but that doesn’t stop Eugene from pulling him against his chest, the skinny arm that curls around his shoulders settling in as a comforting weight, and Merriell dips his head under Eugene’s chin, one of his hands tracing a pattering on Eugene’s thigh. 

“Doesn’t mean I gotta like it. It’s so stupid , she’d rather die than let me help her, all because she can’t deal without her magic. So what, it doesn't want her anymore, boohoo! I never wanted mine in the first place, so really, she should be grateful. She wouldn’t have to live with this stupid curse and I'd-” he stops, his voice too rough to continue, cracking before he can get to the next word. Eugene drags his hands through his curls, his chest feeling tight. 

“You don’t wanna lose your mama”, he finishes. Merriell nods. 

The cold from the floor has seeped into them both, and the stars have lost their comfort. They go back upstairs, avoiding the steps that would croak beneath their feet, hand in hand again because Merriell needs an anchor and Eugene needs to make sure that Merriell won't float away from him. It is by silent agreement that they both go back to Eugene’s room, and in silence, they crawl onto the bed, the space big enough that even if they were fully grown men, it would be able to fit them. It feels too large on it’s own, but with Merriell there, curled up on his side next to him, Eugene thinks it feels like the world condensed into the palm of his hand. They’re close, Merriell having never been shy about invading Eugene’s space, tucking himself in close like a five foot tall teddy bear made of hungry, sharp edges. His eyes are lit silver, like two pale moons, and his breath is warm where it brushes against his chin. 

“Eugene?” Merriell whispers, his hand tentatively finding Eugene’s cheek. Eugene fears that if he moves, he’ll snatch it away, so he stays impossibly still, hardly daring to breathe. 

“... Thank you.” 

Something in Merriell’s expressive eyes tells Eugene that that’s not what had been on the tip of his tongue. He doesn’t know what he’d expected to hear, but regardless, disappointment roils in his belly. 

“It’s no problem”, he says, his hand hesitating before finding Merreill’s waist, the tips of his fingers brushing against it and then retreating when he feels Merriell jump. He doesn’t have the courage to try again, and he misses the warmth when Merriell takes his hand away.

Merriell finds himself able to sleep, at last. 

…

The grass sloshes wetly under his feet, half frozen dew quickly melting as the sun begins to climb higher. The tall yellow grass of the field a little further away from his house bends from the weight of the droplets that cling to their tips, and Eugene tries to help them out by wiping them away, his hands wet and beginning to wrinkle. Merriell watches him with amusement gleaming in his eyes, his cat-like smile quirked up. 

“Hey Gene, watch this”, he says, reaching over to touch a patch of dead brown grass, hands flashing with gentle green flames that return color to the plants, a spot of vibrancy among the winter-dead field. The purple spring flowers curl out of the ground, the soil temporarily unfrozen for them, and Eugene watches in amazement as Merriell makes a ring of color around them, his smile turning smug when he sees the look on Eugene’s face.

“Cool, right?” he purrs. “Way better than when I first started.”

Eugene knows what he means, mind flashing back to when they were about nine and Merriell had only been cultivating his quirk for a good two years and wasn’t nearly as good at using it. 

It’d been this same spot too, where they had been playing pirates and they were clashing swords (sticks), and tripping over themselves to win their little battle, Merriell claiming that he would steal Eugene’s ship (a patch of grass near his home), while Eugene was claiming to steal the tree that Merriell had been using as a base (because Merriell was the only one who could climb it anyways). 

And then Eugene had tripped and hadn’t been able to catch himself, his startled cry scaring Merriell into crying, and when he’d run up to him, he’d found that Eugene had gone and smacked his head against a rock hidden in the grass, head (seemingly) split open and pouring blood. According to Dr. Sledge, the wound hadn’t been nearly as bad as they remembered it, but both boys had been small and the stream of scarlet that had covered Eugene’s face had scared the life out of Merriell (and it still does, a little, the sight of it unnatural and wrong, always too vibrant to his eyes). Before Dr. Sledge had a chance to check it over, Merriell (sobbing and panicking, according to Eugene, which Merriell ardently denies) had brought tiny, sticky hands to Eugene’s snotty face (though Eugene keeps saying he wasn’t crying nearly as hard as Merriell thinks he was), and had tried to heal the wound, palms glowing green and warm. He’d managed to stop the bleeding and nearly heal the thing before promptly passing out and scaring Eugene into a louder crying fit.

There’s no crying now, and Merriell doesn’t look on the verge of passing out as he heals the grass around them, his pride palpable even if he weren’t wearing such a big smirk. 

“I thought flowers were your mama’s thing”, Eugene laughs, and receives an eyeroll in return.

“Her thing is being able to grow flowers outta nothin’. I can only heal what’s already there”, Merriell corrects though he knows perfectly well that Eugene already knew that.

“Are these gonna stay?” Eugene asks, gently tapping at one of the velvet petals, curiosity sparking in him as it always does when Merriell uses his quirk around him. Merriell’s quiet for a moment, almost contemplating, before he says, 

“Probably not. This isn’t their time, and even though I could temporarily bring them back, there is nothing to sustain them for long until the spring returns.”

Eugene takes that in before nodding, plucking up one of the purple bundles of flowers to push into Merriell’s hair. Merriell looks a little surprised by the action, but he doesn’t take the flower out, nor does he tease Eugene for being a sap like he thought he might have. Instead, he retaliates by pulling a clump of grass up by the roots and chucking it in Eugene’s face, bursting into laughter at the look it earns him, contrite and just slightly vengeful. Eugene doesn’t have the kind of face that does “vengeful” well though, so he looks rather more like a disgruntled little fox, mouth pulled into a pout that makes Merriell coo at him. 

It goes downhill from there, obviously. 

Merriell runs, laughing brightly as Eugene chases after him, the grass crunching beneath their shoes and their noses rapidly turning red from the cold, Merriell shedding his coat to be faster, but feeling the cold worse, and though Eugene is taller, his gangly limbs don’t afford him the same quick grace as Merriell. They end up collapsing into each other when Eugene finally changes strategies and goes around the other way, cutting Merriell off and having him crash into him rather than veering off into a different direction. They grapple with each other, and while Merriell is usually more skilled in a scuffle, Eugene uses his slightly greater weight and height to give him an advantage, howling in victory when he manages to pin Merriell beneath him. And then freezes, when he realizes that Merriell is pinned beneath him, his wrists feeling fine and fragile in the grip of his hands, framing his face, his wide shocked eyes a strange dark blue in Eugene’s shadow. 

Eugene is leaning down, and Merriell counts the freckles that cross the bridge of his long nose, traces the way the honey-brown at the center of his eyes fades into green, and he’s leaning up too, his face feeling warm, likely a matching blush like the one that makes Eugene look a shade darker than his har. Their noses brush, Eugene’s hands grow sweaty around Merriell’s wrists. 

Merriell Shelton is sixteen years old, and he hasn’t ever kissed anybody. Eugene Sledge is sixteen years old, his birthday having been last month, and all he can see is the curve of Merriell’s pink mouth. His eyes are glowing and he is warm, and Eugene’s hands feel so damp and clammy, their faces so close, the winter chill respectfully sliding around their little bubble made up of Eugene’s freckles and Merriell’s eyes and the bump of their noses. 

And then they hear Eddy jr.’s voice calling Eugene's name and they’re scrambling off each other so quickly that Eugene’s elbow snaps into Merriell’s chin and Merriell throws him off like he’s a sack of potatoes, he face turning a more violent shade of red and it looks more like they were wrestling rather than… about to do something else (that they won’t put a name to) by the time Eddy jr. gets to them, his face as flushed as theirs but for different reasons.

“Hey, stop messin’ around, Dad’s got something you might like”, Eddie says, pulling the two boys apart with ease (almost as if to remind Eugene that being taller than Merriell is no achievement when Eddy is even taller and ganglier than them both). Eugene grumbles, tearing his arm away, but feeling curious regardless (and perhaps wanting an excuse to escape Merriell’s gaze because that was too close and his heart is still beating far too fast, too much at the rapid tempo of a war drum.)

His palms still feel sweaty. 

There’s a man that Eugene vaguely recognizes as one of his father’s friends waiting for them in the front, his face carved with smiling wrinkles and his twinkling eyes darting to the large box at his feet. Dr. Sledge is beside him, looking bemused, and he nudges the man with his elbow as he says, 

“Gene, my old friend here thought he’d bring you a late birthday gift. Why don’t you have a peak in that box." His father huffs, and Eugene shares a bewildered look with Merriell before leaning down and flipping the top of the box open. 

He’s greeted by a swarm of yipping, energetic puppies, all of them mottled with brown, white, and black spots, ears flopping in their attempts to topple over their cardboard prison.

“Oh my god”, he says, at the same time that Merriell asks, “what is it?”

The man chuckles, kneeling down to join Eugene by the box. 

“They just turned old enough to give away, and I figured I should give you first pick”, he says, sticking his hand in the box to pet at soft ears, laughing when he’s attacked by puppy teeth and excited tongues. 

Eugene looks at them all, chewing at his lip as he tries to decide which one he wants, the incident with Merriell all but forgotten. He’s looking at all the puppys' large dark eyes in hopes of connecting with one, and finds what he’s looking for in one of the smaller ones that’s having trouble fighting its siblings to the top. Eugene picks it out, laughing when its slobbery tongue begins to wipe at his face, little cries squeaking from its mouth. 

“There you go”, the man chuckles. “What are you going to name him?”

Eugene looks at the puppy thoughtfully, gently rubbing at one his floppy ears and fending off his attempts at sloppy kisses (nose wrinkled just slightly at the puppy breath he has to put up with.) He feels Merriell leaning against him, arms crossed atop his head and looming close to get a good look at the dogs, and he can hear him softly cooing at them in French. 

“I think I’ll call him Deacon”, Eugene answers, catching his father’s approving smile out of the corner of his eye. 

The incident with the almost kiss seems to have been wiped from their minds as Eugene and Merriell go back to where they had been, now with a new addition, Deacon chasing them both, yipping and jumping and wagging his tail though he doesn’t quite seem to understand the rules of the game they’re playing. 

When Eugene sits down to take a break, his heart beating a little too fast, he finds that he’s not quite done thinking about what had happened earlier as he’d thought he’d been. His eyes follow the drop of sweat that trails down the side of his glass of water, then looks up to let his eyes follow Merriell, who somehow still has the energy to chase Deacon though the tall grass, his laughter loud and vibrant, warm enough from the running to have shed his coat. His cheeks are flushed again, and Eugene’s mind flashes to how he’d looked when they’d fallen together, face softened with surprise, and though he doesn’t go as bright red as Eugene does (an embarrassing tomato red, if he’s being honest), the soft dusting of pink on his cheeks had been… nice. Eugene had liked it. 

Eugene can admit to himself that he likes Merriell a lot, and he’s aware that Merriell likes him too. Might even like him the way Eugene likes him, if the incident was any indication. And yet the anxious doubt persists, because Eugene is nothing if not an overthinker who has to dissect that interaction until he’s convinced himself it’d been a fluke. 

He sighs and runs a hand across his face, flicking off the sheen of perspiration that had begun to dry down on his skin. 

“Hey Gene, you coming back or what?” Merriell barks from across the yard, trapped beneath Deacon and doing nothing to stop the small dog from licking his face. Eugene smiles, allowing himself a small sigh. 

“Yeah, can’t let my dog like you more than me!” he calls back, setting down his glass of water and running back, the laughter in his chest bubbling out again. 

Merriell grins at him, sweet and catlike, and Eugene feels confident in being able to put his swirling ball of thoughts back on the back burner for a while longer. 

…

Merriell’s mother dies a few months later. 

Eugene is thankful that Merriell isn’t here to see her deterioration, how even with medicine she’s in constant pain, her face ashen and sickly and sunken. Her gaze is empty, like her eyes are made of marble when the life finally leaves her and the daisies that Mary Frank had left carefully arranged on the desk next to her bed had shriveled and died with her. 

The day of the funeral, the sky mourns for her too, the rain heavy and and the sky roiling with clouds the color of slate. There’s not a lot of people at her funeral, but the ones that are  there seem entirely heartbroken, (and Eugene is aware that they’d wanted to do the funeral in Louisiana, but Mirriam had wanted to be buried in Alabama, and it’s only after eavesdropping on a conversation with his mother that he knows that it’s because the first man she loved is buried here too). He wonders if it was Merriell’s dad, then stops himself from thinking about it because he knows it isn’t his business, and he finds that in his own grief (because she’d very much been like an aunt to him), that he doesn’t care. 

What he does care about is that she’s gone. Maybe he’s also upset that Merriell doesn’t have a reason to visit him anymore, but moreso, he’s upset that Merriell’s lost his mother. They’ve both lost someone that they love. 

Merriell arrives a day before the funeral, and for the first time he meets Grandmere Shelton, a woman as petite as her daughter and grandson, and a face twice as severe, her hooded eyes roaming the grounds of the Sledge manor with a judgement that prickles under Eugene’s skin, the color of them- or, not quite color, because it looks like the color’s been dried out of them, leaving them the same washed out shade of the sky. Merriell looks like he hasn’t slept, his eyes glassed over into a shiny, sad gray, red rimmed and bruised, his mouth pulled into a tired line. His grandmother keeps a hand on his shoulder as they’re led in, greeting the Sledges in a voice tinged closer to French than cajun. 

They walk the hallways like ghosts, drifting up into their rooms in silence, two distant figures in a mourning black. 

Eugene waits until later (when the eldest Shelton is conversing quietly with his parents in the drawing room) to go find Merriell, hoping he isn’t intruding on him, his stomach twisted up in knots. His heart feels all twisted up in his chest and his own grief threatens to spike up, the emotion clogging up his throat, and he can’t imagine what it must be like for Merriell, who loved his mother so much, who wanted to save her, who’d felt her rejection like a stab to his back. His shoes click against the floor like the ticking of a clock, like a timer that goes off when he stops at Merriell’s door. 

He knocks before he can second guess himself, and in the next few minutes that pass, he wonders if he should knock again when he hears Merriell’s voice through the door telling him to come in. Eugene can’t tell what emotion might be coloring it. 

He enters, closing the door with a quiet click behind him. 

“Merriell”, he says, his voice low and quiet, the rasp of it crackling in the thick silence that blankets the room. He hasn’t felt this off balance with him since Ms. Shelton first began to live with them, when Merriell wasn’t around nearly enough for Eugene to get a good read on him. 

But he knows him now. And Merriell… Merriell’s sitting on the bed, his legs crossed beneath him, eyes cast to one of the pallid walls. He’s still wearing his stony mask of silence, mouth pulled into a thin, hard line, and he’s so still he could have been carved from marble, a statue of a moment in mourning, grief sharpening the plains of his face. Eugene wouldn’t have to know Merriell to know he’s upset, but he does have to know him to see the spider web cracks along his stony facade, the faint wobble of his lip. His hands clenched tightly into fists (and Eugene knows that his blunt nails are buried into the meat of his palm because otherwise he would be well and truly on his way to tears, and even by himself, Merriell doesn’t like to cry. 

“Merry”, Eugene says again. (Nothing, Merriell says again)

Eugene cautiously goes up to him, ready to back off if Merriell doesn’t want him there. Merriell doesn’t even seem to notice he’s there, not when the bed dips when he sits down next to him, and not when Eugene calls his name for a third time. Three strikes, and the glass has yet to break. 

Eugene places his hand over Merrill’s (he gets a flinch in return), turns it over so he can gently begin to loosen his fingers, red indents left in the meat of his palm to fade once Eugene gets his fingers to unstick. He twines his hand with Merriell’s and squeezes, trying to infuse as much comfort into the gesture as he can. And Merriell turns to him at last, his wet eyes glossed over, an uncertainty like none that Eugene has ever seen in him filling them, too vast to comprehend. Merriell  squeezes his hand back, and the first tear falls. 

…

The letter arrives a day after Mirriam Shelton is declared dead. 

Grandmere reads it first, once, twice, thrice even, as if she can’t quite seem to believe what’s written there (as if she can’t quite believe that her prediction had come true, because she’d been so sure her daughter would let Merriell heal her. She’d forgotten how stubborn her daughter is.) And Grandmere does as she’s always done when the emotions want to overtake her, lets herself become numb instead, her countenance icing over to keep herself from overflowing. 

Merriell feels the shift of it as soon as he gets home from school, tilting his head curiously when he finds her waiting for him in the sitting room, trepidation crawling coldly up his spine at the frostiness in her eyes. There is a letter in her hands, and she holds it out to him, her mouth flattened into a thin line. He drops his backpack by the door, something sharp and prickly growing in his belly when he recognizes Dr. Sledge’s curling script on the envelope that his Grandmere’s carefully opened- not from Eugene, who’s letter she'd leave unbothered in his room, nor Mrs. Sledge who doesn't write very often, and not his mother, whose letters she reads out loud to him, something they both find a bit of catharsis in. No. It’s Dr. Sledge’s curling script, elegant as it runs along the crisp surface of the envelope, precise (for a doctor) when Merriell opens up the page inside, short, but not unkind in its brevity. 

The letter catches green flames when Merriell finishes it, and his Grandmere does not look terribly surprised. Merriell doesn’t notice that he’s burning the page, his eyes roaming it over and over until it’s gone to ashes in his hand and the words are still flashing in his mind like they’ve been printed there permanently. His body feels too hot, that prickly thing in his belly puncturing the breath from his lungs, and this must be what it’s like to be a volcano, broiling heat spilling out of him but it’s tears that fall instead of lava and volcanoes don’t shake like he’s shaking. His Grandmere doesn’t hug him, but she comes to stand by him, placing a hand on his shoulder to share the ice that dulls her pain. The fire leaves Merriell’s hands (leaves his entire body), and he collapses onto the couch, a puppet with its strings cut. 

He does not speak, and neither does his grandmere. They don’t need to to know they’re both thinking the same thing- she’s gone. 

Merriell allows the numbness to persist even after his grandmere takes her influence with her. Better the dull ache of the numb than the agonizing pain that the fire brings with it, unnatural to him when he’s so used to being a source of comfort rather than something that burns the way he burns inside. 

Everything after that happens in a blur of sound and color, the cajun French drawl of his cousins, condolences from adults who flash him by like the lights at night through the blurry window of a car, indistinct, melding together into something altogether meaningless. What is a sorry good for when it can’t bring back his maman? What good is all the casseroles that the neighbors bring over when Merriell feels too hollowed out to eat, his insides pitted to make space for the hunk of ice that entombs a hungry, vengeful fire. 

Merriell isn’t catholic, but he grew up adjacent to it, and maybe, maybe he’d once thought it nice to have a God to believe in, one that if he prayed to enough his mother would be okay (or she’d let him help her), but now whenever he hears His name invoked, his mother in a stranger’s prayers, he feels. Tired. Maybe God shouldn’t have taken her from him in the first place. Maybe God should have minded His fuckin’ business. 

Maybe Merriell should’ve prayed harder. Maybe his prayers don’t count. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t- 

He just wants his maman back. 

…

He doesn’t remember packing. He doesn’t remember the cab ride to the train station or the scenery by his window that goes by in faint flashes of green and gold. If he and Grandmere converse, he doesn’t remember the words that pass between them. His heart beats in the empty chasm of his chest, insistent and slow and to the rhythmic pulse in his head, the one that aches behind his eyes and pulls tension into his shoulders. 

Is summer supposed to feel this cold? 

Can it be classified as summer when the world has taken on a monotonous shade of gray that permeates down beneath the roots of the trees, dips into his very flesh, and injects itself into the sky. His thoughts (what few of them he has) are long, meandering, and he loses himself in his head because at least then he won’t have to think about the simmering burn of the loss he feels. 

There is a wall to his left, familiar, pale, and for whatever reason his eyes have stuck to it in a desperate attempt to keep himself from fracturing. It’s smooth, and in the low light that spreads in from the window, he can’t quite pinpoint the color, but he thinks it might be somewhere between gray and blue, (like his mother’s eyes when it rained) and he’s burning again, thawing out the ice in his veins because he’s not enough like his Grandmere to hold onto it, and instead, he focuses on the pain of his nails chewing on his palm. 

“Merriell”, he hears, Eugene’s voice smoothing against him like a balm, but he can’t look, he can’t look, he can’t…

Eugene’s hand is warm in his, soft and smooth, his thumb stroking gently at the back of his hand, and when Merriell finally looks, finally finds someone’s eyes again, he finds the melted chocolate warmth of Eugene’s eyes and feels himself melt in turn. Eugene looks tired too, his skin waxy and his hair a little greasy, but Merriell feels comfort knowing that they share a similar wound, raw at the edges and pulsing with shared grief. He still feels the barbs of it in his belly, but the fire dies down and the anger- the anger doesn't leave, per say, but it transfers more into sadness, and he lets himself lean on Eugene, closes his eyes as the tears begin to fall, not minding because it’s Eugene, who’s crying too and whose presence feels… it’s the best Merriell’s felt in the past few days. 

They don’t speak, but the silence doesn’t feel so thick anymore, less suffocating than it is comforting now. 

…

They’ve always been pretty much inseparable when Merriell comes over, and now Eugene feels as if they might be attached at the hip because they can’t seem to leave each other alone for any length of time. The funeral is in a few days and Eugene feels like he needs to keep Merriell from crumbling into little pieces (and that in itself keeps him together because if he’s concentrating on Merriell then he doesn’t have to think about himself and it’s a welcome distraction from the ache in his chest. Unhealthy for them both? Perhaps, but he doesn’t care, his best friend- sorry Sid- just lost his mom and he lost someone he cares about so they can be a little codependent to cope. Just for a little bit). 

Merriell’s normally a bit of a motormouth, and trying to follow along his winding train of thought is feat that Eugene’s become accomplished at, but he’s become nearly mute recently, and it’s Eugene who fills the silence now, and he doesn’t know if Merriell’s listening or not, but his eyes seem attentive rather than dull and blank so he keeps rambling about whatever comes to mind (Deacon, the things he got up to with Sid, Eddie jr and his mother’s ongoing war about something stupid, Deacon, the fox he saw down by the pond when he and his father went duck hunting a while back, Deacon-)

Eugene thinks Deacon plays a big part in keeping them both sane over the next two days before the funeral properly begins. Merriell doesn't smile, that seems a little beyond him at the moment, but there's something like it that curves his mouth because he can talk to Deacon when he can’t talk to Eugene, and Eugene can’t begrudge him that. He wonders if Merriell feels less vulnerable, murmuring his thoughts in French into Deacon's fur than he would murmuring them to him, and he’s almost grateful for it, because Eugene doesn't know if he could hold any more pain than his own before he spills over with it. 

(Merriell disappears into the nearby woods for two hours, Deacon chasing after him, and Eugene would go after him, but the Philips are there to pay their condolences and he wants to see Sid, who he knows isn’t as bogged down by the death of Merriell’s mother because he hadn’ known her very well despite her years living with the Sledges. He’s sad, of course, but it's the distant grief of a stranger, who understands the concept of the pain, but isn’t quite flattened by the immensity of it.)

“I’m sorry”, Sid says as Eugene buries his face into his shoulder, the sobs that want to bubble up again carefully tucked away in favor of a watery smile that comes out more as a grimace. 

“How’s Merriell doin?”

Eugene looks away, shrugs. Sid winces. The light catches on his golden curls, and Eugene remembers that as a child, he’d adored them, having been mesmerized by the blue of Sid’s eyes. All he wants now is Merriell. 

When Merriell returns, the sun’s begun to set, scorching the horizon and leaving the blue hands of night to cover the sky. He smells of smoke and burnt wood, the woods lingering in the form of leaves in his dark curls, eyes matching the green of them. Deacon plops behind him, like the tiniest, slowest bodyguard, and they both shiver, because while the blooming summer is hot, the night still has a tinge of chill to it. 

“Did you find anything?” Eugene asks, as if he hadn’t been worried sick over Merriell for what felt like an eternity on the day before his mother’s service. 

“Just a lot of burnt wood”, Merriell answers, his voice rough and raspy, and Eugene thinks that perhaps talking hurts for him because he hasn’t done it so long and that’s why there’s the twist of pain to his mouth. 

(Merriell only sobs properly, openly that night as they’re curled in bed together, no pretenses made that they’d ever planned to sleep anywhere else. He strung like a bow, taught and uncomfortable, and he’s buried his face in Eugene’s chest and Eugene has his arms wrapped around him, and he thinks he might be crying too because the darkness is blurry and his face feels too warm. Merriell’s hands feel too warm too, almost uncomfortably so, but they never catch flame, and Eugene never feels in danger of being hurt, had already concluded when he was seven years old and Merriell had fixed the scrape on his knee despite being total strangers that Merriell could never ever hurt him. And he hasn’t. 

He thinks the rain must have started last night, but he doesn’t remember, all other noise drowned beneath the roar of his ears and the thump of his heart and Merriell’s heartbroken sobs, visceral in the grief that they carry. Eugene doesn’t actually remember falling asleep, but they must, at some point, because when he wakes up, the blanket is tangled around his legs and Merriell is curled into his side, face soothed with with sleep and Eugene contemplates staying there with him for a while longer). 

Merriell doesn’t remember much of the funeral service either. 

He remembers that the day’s been leached of color, like he Grandmere's eyes, and it’s cold and rainy but somehow his family’s all made it out to watch his maman be put into the ground, and whether they’re resentful of her or not, they each have wet eyes, and it tugs at something in his chest, but not enough to pull him entirely out of his daze. He remembers the rain, and he remembers holding Eugene’s hand after his eulogy, but that’s about it. 

There’s a comfort in putting her to rest and knowing that she can’t suffer anymore like this, and there’s an agony that goes alongside it, knowing that he’ll never get to see her again outside of his memories or the few pictures he has of her. He’s in a limbo, between angry and numb and he can’t decide which one he wants to be, because he wants to burn , wants everyone to feel the pain that he feels, and he wants to keep it all in like he was taught to, to examine those feeling and toss them into the back corner of his mind before he explodes with them. Eugene holds his hand. Eugene is crying too, tears slipping quietly down his face, hair flattened and turned brown by the rain. People pat his shoulders or hold his hands and he doesn’t feel any of that through the cold numb of the rain, the torrent of emotions that washes through him flushed out until there’s nothing but the exhaustion left. 

…

Merriell knows that people die. He’d felt that strange empty loss when his grandpa had died, too distant for him to actually feel the loss but just close enough that he feels it like the ache of a missing tooth, and every time he’d tip his tongue against it, he could feel the strangeness of it not being there. But he hadn’t so much needed to recover from his grandpa’s death like his maman and Grandmere, as he’d waited for the world to recalibrate so that things can go back to normal. 

He doesn’t know how to do that now. It’s not a baby tooth that he’s missing, that’ll grow back, but an entire limb that’s been severed from him, buried in a nearby cemetery. Merriell doesn’t  know how to set the world back on its axis, and there isn’t a manual for it in the Sledge’s expansive library. He’s read nearly every book in there, he thinks, and the ones that he hasn’t read, Sledge has read to him, nights together when it stormed or snowed and they’d be curled under the blankets together with a flashlight between them, taking turns whispering silly voices for the characters they were reading. He wishes it were that easy again. 

But he still has Sledge, and he’s trying to make himself useful so that Sledge can have him too, but he feels too much like something covered in sharp spines, painful to touch, painful to even look at his grief burns so brightly and he knows that it can't be easy for Sledge. 

It’s hard to bring himself to care sometimes. 

…

It’s a Sunday that Eugene sees Merriell smile again. They’re at the pond, and Merriell is laying in the grass, his shirt gone to soak in the heat that’s finally broken through several days worth of rain, and he’s lazily watching Deacon chase Sid into the water, looking half asleep. Eugene is already in the water, allowing himself to relax, to let the gentle lapping of the pond wash out the heavy grief that had plagued him since the week after Mirriam’s death. Merriell’s been quiet, mostly, and he continues his trips into the woods to do whatever it is he does, coming back trailing the scent of fire and burnt wood, and every time, Deacon would go with him, coming back when the setting sun’s set fire to the sky. 

He’s allowed to stay for the rest of the summer, which Eugene is honestly grateful for- normally, at most, Merriell only stays for two weeks over the summer, and now Eugene doesn’t have to see him go and spend the next three months wallowing, wondering how Merriell’s doing, if he’s still hurting, if he has someone to share his hurt with (and feeling jealous if he does, then guilty for his selfishness). 

Deacon barks and Eugene jumps, startled from his thoughts, and then he’s laughing (it still sounds kind of odd to his ears, he hasn’t laughed in long enough that his mouth has become accustomed to it). Sid pulls himself up from where he’s fallen, his eyes blinking and startlingly blue compared to the mud that covers the rest of his face. He’s scowling at Deacon, and then turns his angry stare at Eugene when he hears him laugh, lumping up a pile of mud and lobbing it at his head. Eugene doesn’t even need to duck, the ball of mud falling short half of the way there, landing with a wet plop into the pond. And behind Sid, curled up on the picnic blanket, still a little ashen and thin, Merriell smiles, the edges of his mouth pulling up slightly and giving the impression of his cat-grin, the one that’s nothing but mischievous when used full force. 

He doesn’t join them in the pond and he doesn't hurl insults at Sid, nor does he make fun of the bright red burn that develops on Eugene’s shoulders despite all the sunscreen he’d piled on, but he smiles. 

Eugene counts that as a win, and though he doubts Merriell will feel entirely better anytime soon, it’s good to see something other than desolation on his face. 

They fall into something of a routine, and slowly, Merriell starts to bloom again, Mary Frank refusing to let him go without eating and Dr. Sledge gently nudging him into healthier habits, into going out with Eugene and Sid, into silent talks about how he’s feeling (and Eugene doesn’t know exactly what Merriell tells him, but he doesn’t feel like he needs to, because Merriell talks to him too, in the blanket of night while the stars twinkle). They sleep in the same room, and Eugene’s parents don’t comment on it. Some nights, Merriell can’t sleep, restless and itching for something- anything to keep himself from drowning, and Eugene reads to him or holds him while he cries, sobs tearing harshly at his throat, or they both stay awake until the sun tinges the sky with gold and fall asleep when the darkness leaves, only waking again when it’s midday and Mary Frank is calling outside the door for them to get something to eat. 

Merriell doesn’t heal anything or anyone for the next two months. Eugene tries to get him to try, just once, but the acrid scent of fire and the fury and agony that assures him that Merriell’s grief is still alive and well and burning and that he doesn’t have it in him to heal anything before the fire is soothed, and for all the progress that he’s made, his wound is still wide and weeping and the scarring is slow going. Eugene does not push for him to use his quirk again. 

(It wasn’t even so much an argument or a fight, but they didn’t talk much the day after and then the day after that they pretend that the whole thing never happened, Eugene is fine with that, better than locking each other out permanently). 

…

“It’s hard to talk about her. Hard to think about her”, Merriell says, his voice half lost to the wind. 

They’re outside, Eugene had convinced his parents to let them “camp out”, and while the wind whips noisily through the trees, the sky is clear and the stars rain their light down on them, filling the cracks where the moon’s silver touch doesn’t reach. Eugene doesn’t know what time it is, but he doesn’t feel tired, his eyes drifting to Merriell, catching his profile as he opens up, like he’s a camila and the moon is the key to his blooming. 

“That’s normal”, Eugene responds softly, “she was your mother. I wouldn't be half as composed as you if I lost my mama, I don’t know how you’re able to be so calm.”

A beat later he winces, hoping that Merriell doesn’t take that badly because he doesn’t mean it to be judgemental, but Merriell’s smiling, a faint thing that strikes a chord in Eugene’s chest. The more it appears, the more he realizes how much he’s missed it, and he aches for when he’ll be able to see it fully, all white teeth and dimples and grinning eyes. 

“I sneak off into the woods to burn shit”, he says. There’s humor to his tone, as if he’s making fun of himself and Eugene laughs quietly with him, because it is a little ridiculous, even if he understands why Merriell’s doing it. 

After a moment of comforting silence, Eugene sits up, curling his arms around his knees, eyes going back to the sky, tracing the constellations and feeling the moon’s gaze lit by its large, milky eye. Merriell follows his lead, tilting his head to rest it on his knees, their breathing syncing up slow and soft. They end up drifting together, and Eugene doesn’t know when, but he finds that they’ve bumped against each other, Merriell’s arm lining up with his, his curls brushing up against his shoulder. He’s warm. Merriell’s always been warm, and without speaking, Merriell places an arm around Eugene’s waist and Eugene reciprocates with an arm around Merriell’s shoulders. 

The wind whistles at them, like a cheering friend. 

“I miss her too”, Eugene offers. Merriell nods, then says, 

 “She’d be glad. She loved you too.”

Eugene’s heart is beating too fast, and he wonders if Merriell can hear it. He can feel, just faintly, the steady pulse of Merriell’s heart in a vein in his throat and he can smell the faint sweetness of his shampoo. 

“Thanks Gene. For… everything.”

Eugene doesn’t know what to say to that- he doesn’t feel like he’s done anything, but Merriell’s looking at him, with those silver-blue eyes of his, tired and sad, but no longer drowning in grief, and there’s a flicker of green in there, and Eugene-

Eugene slowly lies down, Merriell going with him, slotted together and breathing too fast, the night hiding the red that heats both of their faces. 

“Can I..?” Eugene starts, his voice rough and unsure.

“You don’t need to ask Gene, I’ll let you know if I want to or not”, Merriell huffs, and doesn’t give Eugene the chance to get offended because he’s pressed their mouths together, chaste and nervous (for Merriell), before Eugene brings him in properly, assuring him firmly that this is exactly where he wants to be.