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Getting adopted by the Baskerville family had been the best thing that had ever happened to Gilbert. He and Vincent got to live in a safe, and warm, and comfortable house, and Glen and Jack took care of them, and kept them safe, and made Vince smile.
Of course, nothing in Gil’s life could be completely perfect and happy, as was proved by the completely horrid girls next door.
The Baskerville twins had a house all to themselves, pretty much, though almost every week Lottie would come in and lecture them about cleanliness and scrub the house down. Gil liked to watch when that happened: Lottie was, after all, the only person who ever yelled at the girls, other than Gil and Vince, and unlike Gil and Vince, neither twin ever yelled back at Lottie, though they didn’t clean up after themselves either.
But mostly, the Baskerville twins and the newly-adopted Baskerville brothers clashed in the backyards, when the twins were able to actually make it downstairs and then out of their house into the backyard, and up in the girls’ shared bedroom when they couldn’t, because Jack had never despaired of making the four of them get along (though Alice, unlike Alyss, was always just slightly wary around Jack) and so often brought Gil and Vince along with him on his visits to the twins, despite the fact that Alyss enjoyed mocking Vince and Alice enjoyed fighting Gil whenever he tried to punch her sister for daring to mock his brother.
They would roll around in the grass, kicking and biting and pulling each others’ hair as Vince and Alyss shot insults at each other or Vince hunted down the girls’ pets—he had blinded Alyss’s cat, once, and had gotten as far as Alice’s rabbit’s cage before the girl had bitten a hole in his arm.
Maybe it was kind of rude of Vince to do those sorts of things to the girls’ pets, but the girls deserved it, and anyway as much as Gilbert disliked Vincent at times nobody else should be allowed to criticize or hate his brother.
So, after Vince got stitches for his arm and was put to bed, as Glen Baskerville lectured Alice on appropriate use of violence, Gil snuck into Alice’s room and took her beloved black rabbit from its hutch, and, in the downstairs bathroom (neither twin was allowed downstairs and when they were already in trouble Gil knew neither would dare sneak down) he carefully pulled out first the bleach he’d gotten Lily to get him from the store—animal safe bleach, of course, carefully altered so that it couldn’t actually kill anything, because as deeply as Gilbert hated Alice fucking Baskerville he had no desire to actually kill her pet. Even Vince hadn’t killed Alyss’s cat—he’d only blinded it, and it was still horribly around, hissing and swiping at everything in reach other than Alyss.
So, once the black rabbit was a nearly-white yellow, Gil took out the other bottle he’d brought—a bright green dye—and carefully slathered the rabbit in it, waiting until his timer went off, and then carefully cleaning the rabbit off: a bright, key lime green thing, snuffling at him with its dark eyes as he carefully toweled it down and scooped it into his arms to carry it back upstairs.
And by the time the plots of the long-dead Lacie and Levi came into fruition—by the time Jack Vessalius stood over Glen Baskerville’s cooling body—by the time Vince grabbed Gil and ran, ran, ran away, Gilbert looking back in horror at the crumpled bloody form of Alice Baskerville at the bottom of the staircase—
The rabbit was still partially green, in Alice’s arms, as she screamed at Jack, as she left her suddenly-vanished sister’s empty room behind and fled into the basement where her mother’s experiments and Levi’s plots mixed together, when she tripped and fell suddenly into oblivion, the rabbit tumbling from her arms—
(“I like this one,” Oz said, wrapping a bright green scarf around his neck and grinning at Gilbert. “It reminds me of you!” He twirled around in the dressing room. “How do you like it?”)