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After spending the better part of 30 minutes trying to find Kel’s lost shoe, Hero realized exactly where it would be. While the others are looking far and wide, he smiles a bit to himself and slips out the backdoor. Kel leaves his stuff in the tree house all the time, and honestly he hasn’t seen his brother wear these sandals in a good while.
As he draws close to the tree house, the backdoor slides open again with a slam. It draws his attention immediately- it sounded frantic. He’s caught off guard by the sight of Sunny sprinting towards him with a speed that he didn’t know the kid was capable of. Stunned, Hero doesn’t resist when Sunny nearly barrels into him, monkey climbing up the tree house ladder two rungs at a time. “…Wanted the glory of finding the shoe yourself, Sunny?” He laughs weakly, but he’s puzzled when Sunny just comes back down without a word. Clutched in his arms is a sketchbook, though Hero notes it's not the one he usually carries around with him.
Hero watches Sunny walk back through the yard and into the house, his pace faster than a fast walk but slower than a jog. The door closes with a much nicer click noise this time. What the hell just happened? He writes it off as Sunny being an enigma and climbs up into the treehouse to get a second look for the shoe. As soon as his head reaches high enough to see into the treehouse, he immediately sees Kel’s shoe. Honestly, Sunny must have jumped over it in his dash. Grabbing it, he slides back down the ladder and heads back inside as well.
---
The waves lap at the shore of the beach slowly, the sea being relatively calm today. Gentle roaring of the ocean overlays the sounds of the four younger friends playing farther down near the shore. “Sorry if my brother tracks sand into your car.” Mari melts into her chair in embarrassment, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I told Kel not to bury him, and I figure Sunny shouldn’t have stood still enough to let him.” The two of them share a few chuckles about their respective siblings. As they chat, Hero snakes his arm around her shoulder in a moment of boldness. Pulling her closer to him causes her to blush and grin. “Whoa, no PDA at the beach, Hero.” She squeezes his arm with her hand, giving his smooth skin the slightest of pecks.
Immediately Hero flushes and stammers, causing Mari to laugh uncontrollably. He retracts his arm like a kicked puppy. “Y-You think you’re real cute, don’t you?” Yes, she is. And she knows it.
She sticks her tongue out at him playfully before settling back down. The wind lazily rolling across the beach picks up bits of sand and throws it around. Their umbrella firmly rooted in the sand shakes faintly with the gusts. Mari makes a startled laugh and Hero follows her gaze over to Kel and Sunny. The sand blows into Sunny’s face, specks flying into his hair, leaving the black locks peppered. Kel laughs while he wipes the sand off of his sand-bound friend, rustling his hair and brushing it off his forehead so he doesn’t get it in his eyes when he opens them again. Sunny’s face is beet red.
“Looks like he got sunburnt despite that extra strength sunblock.” Hero sighs. He feels bad for Mari and Sunny having such pale skin, as he’s notoriously a sunburn magnet.
Mari snickers softly. “Yeah, he’s sunburnt.” He raises a brow at that, watching her face as she seems to hold herself back from saying something. Her hand covers her mouth, a big smile failing to be suppressed.
“What’s so funny?”
The question just makes her grin wider and turn her head away. “Ah, sorry, it’s nothing. Sibling secret.”
He frowns, not wanting to pry but also being curious. Opting to let it go, he looks ahead again. Kel is distracted from Sunny, busy throwing sand at Aubrey after she dropped seaweed on his shoulder. The sand he throws immediately goes straight to Sunny’s face, and Basil quickly wipes it away for him while Kel and Aubrey battle to the death.
Hero can’t help but notice Sunny’s sunburnt cheeks are less red.
He smirks a bit. Had he been blushing?
---
Once it’s time to leave, it takes some whining from Kel and some teamwork from everyone to get Sunny out of his sand coffin. As it turns out, sand is heavy, especially when the waves are lapping up and soaking it, weighing it down more. Kel and Basil enlist themselves on the Sunny barricade department, dragging a nearby log to try to shield Sunny’s head from the waves as they dig him up. The sun is starting to set and with it the temperature slowly drops.
Sunny looks a little miserable, his hair soaking wet and covered in kelp and sea foam from the wave that had submerged him when nobody was looking. Luckily, they’re able to dig away the sand enough to drag him out, the sand trying to pull him back in with the suction of the wet grains. Sunny holds onto Hero’s shoulders and he yanks him up, finally freeing him from the ground. “There ya go, Sunny!” Hero laughs, setting him down.
Sunny looks relieved now that he’s not being subjected to the taunting waves drawing close to his face. “Thanks.” He sighs.
Mari pinches a piece of kelp that clung to his hair, pulling it off and dropping it away. “Let’s go grab the towels and pack up, shall we?”
They all follow her lead, packing up their chairs, umbrellas, and various beach toys. Sunny for the most part missed the packing up part, instead spending his time trying to get the sand and beach grime out of his hair and such. Once everything is loaded up, the kids are next. Basil and Aubrey sit in the middle row while Kel and Sunny sit in the far back.
Basil turns around to smile at them. “That was a lot of fun. Sorry we didn’t build a dam for you in the first place, Sunny.”
There’s a snort as Aubrey turns her head enough to glance at them. “Good thing Mari was watching out. Burying Sunny like that probably wasn’t the best idea, Kel.”
Kel crosses his arms, huffing and leaning back hard against the seat, the motion shaking the car a bit. “How was I supposed to know that the water was going to come up that far? The shoreline was so far down!”
Sunny pats his shoulder reassuringly. “If I didn’t want to be buried I would have stopped you.”
Kel gestures dramatically to Sunny. “See? Not my fault.”
Hero adjusts the mirrors. Mari had driven them there, and she was shorter than he is. As he adjusts the rearview mirror, he tilts it and catches a glimpse of Sunny and Kel in the farthest seat in the back. Kel is leaning against Sunny, having fallen asleep immediately after the squabble with Aubrey. The mirror tilts a different way and he pauses, tilting it back to get a second look.
Sunny has a small smile on his face, his cheeks much pinker than they had been before getting in the car. Adjusting the mirror into the correct position again, Hero suppresses a grin. That is definitely a blush. At his side, Mari is in the passenger seat. He catches the glance she throws his way, the soft knowing smile. Leaning in, she gives him a peck on the cheek that makes Hero forget entirely about his previous train of thought.
---
They unpack their friends, all of them filtering into Sunny and Mari’s house to reclaim their long-forgotten beds in the living room. Mari carries Sunny in on her back, and Kel quietly complains that Hero woke him up instead of doing that as well. She lays Sunny down on the bed he had made on the floor, letting Aubrey take the couch like she had declared earlier in the morning. Basil sits on the ground in front of the couch, eyeing the tv remote. Kel sits next to Basil, which happens to be next to Sunny as he dozes away.
Noticing the abundance of blankest but lack of pillows, Hero puts down the beach bag. “I’ll go grab the pillows real fast.” He ambles up the stairs, picking a grain of sand out of his hair. Walking into Mari and Sunny’s room used to feel weird, but now that he knows Sunny hoards all the pillows he’s been given permission to go get them whenever they have a sleepover.
Lifting up the pillows stacked in the corner near Sunny’s bed, he sees the glint of metal sticking out from one left on the floor. Moving aside the pillow gently with his foot, he realizes it’s the metal ring of a spiral bound journal. The same one that Sunny had 20-meter dashed up the treehouse for.
Okay, so maybe Hero shouldn’t be snooping, but he can’t help himself. Kneeling down, he glances toward the open door to make sure nobody’s there before flipping the notebook open. It’s mostly blank pages, but he flips through to a random page deep within the book and finds a rather ordinary looking drawing of Kel and Sunny. The abstract and dream-like backgrounds are gone, replaced with nothing but the white space of the paper…and the teeniest, tiniest little heart in the air between Kel and Sunny. It’s drawn so small that Hero almost thinks it’s an eraser shaving. It’s so small that it screams insecurity, as if it was afraid of existing on the page at all.
Hero immediately feels bad for having pried, his cheeks flushed with shame. Though, he can’t help but grin as he thinks about Sunny having sprinted out to grab this book, as if it held his deepest darkest secrets, how Sunny was burning red around Kel the whole time Kel was within a 4 foot distance from him at the beach, and so many other times that Hero hadn’t thought anything of it.
Opting to leave the last pillow behind to cover up the notebook, he hoists the others under his arms and hurries back downstairs. It seems he’s too late to supply his brother with a pillow, as Kel has already passed out completely, his head lolling at an odd angle against the couch. Hero pretends not to notice Sunny’s half opened eye and small smile as Kel slips down gradually lower and lower until he nearly rolls onto Sunny.
After passing out pillows, everyone gradually falls asleep. As Hero’s own eyes start to grow heavy, he feels Mari shift and whisper something. Thinking she’s talking to him, he forces one of his eyes open and finds Mari covering her mouth, looking down to the floor where their brothers lay. Kel had rolled on top of Sunny completely, with Kel laying on his back diagonally across Sunny’s side. Mari is trying hard not to laugh and alert anyone. He lifted his shirt and hid his face inside, just letting his eyes poke above the collar to glare at his sister.
Closing his eye, Hero forgets he saw anything- though he can’t keep the small smile at bay.
Mari saves her poor brother, gently dragging Kel off of him and placing Kel’s long-forgotten pillow under his head. She gives Sunny a thumbs up, which only makes Sunny huff and roll onto his stomach, putting the pillow over his head to hide himself away.