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The sound of TV wakes him up.
Through the blur of early wakefulness, he makes out a tangle of clouds, a suggestion of light threading through them, but first of all - someone screaming. It takes him a minute, to get his bearings back.
The room is as dim as it was all week, property of the weather still raging outside. There’s a couch underneath him, his head stuck, tilting, on an armrest, but he only knows that because the sky on the screen reflects him - there’s no pain in his body where he would expect it to hurt. There’s no pain at all. He must have fallen asleep watching the documentary, and was probably out for at least an hour, because the video was certainly about fish and in its first five minutes of screen time when he decided that laying down would be a good idea. Which means that it’s later than seven, now.
Which means that he’s being late.
It takes two minutes from the couch to the door, inside his shoes - silently grateful for all the mornings he’s overslept that made this type of run a routine, and for his former self that put on a sweater two hours in advance.
He doesn’t really need to rush, he guesses, trying to fix his hair in the elevator, thankfully alone. But the TV kept blaring sounds of distress at him, and that, mixed with the rain, made him nervous in a way he couldn’t really shake off, until the door closed behind. And it is already past seven, and he has places to be, and a slippery road to navigate at snail’s pace. His phone, buzzing in one of his pockets, is a reminder enough to be careful. He’s guilty enough already.
The next thing he knows - he’s there almost in time. He double checks, but the numbers on his car panel are the same as on his lockscreen, his watch, and he clutches the seatbelt, still on, to catch a breath. 19:37. It wasn’t recklessness, he reminds himself. The roads were just strangely empty, if he remembers hard enough. He only just guessed the time, he thinks, looking at the outline of the jeep parked neatly next to his own car. Maybe he almost hasn’t overslept, always going to be on time.
The front door opens - the traitor - and he has no choice but to push all the stupid thoughts to the side. His head hasn’t been on straight, okay. Whatever. That’s what he came for, he thinks, looking at the shadowed figure gesturing widely in his direction. The laugh he can feel building in his chest is almost enough to justify the way he gets soaked up through all of three steps to the porch. It’s not, sadly, enough to make him forget why he tried to talk himself out of coming, but everyone has their flaws. Daniel’s not at fault that their are a little too intertwined.
“Hey,” he huffs, smiling, then tosses back, “Evan acquired!”, and “Please let’s close the door already,” directed at him, again.
Evan lets his laugh, wilted but still strong, escape him. “No one forced you to be a butler,” he quips, and then takes a moment, crouched to unlace his shoes, to just take him in. All of the blond hair, obedient without the help of any outer forces, and brown eyes, same as Maddie’s - his face a collage of them both, and the weight in his cheeks, his hands, turning the key - he looks healthy, and happy, and healthy again, for good measure. Evan breathes out.
And regrets it immediately, because the second he’s standing again, his lungs threaten to shrink ten sizes smaller with the force he is being squeezed with.
“Well, I haven’t seen my brother in a very long time,” Daniel shrugs, pulling away. “That could make one a little sentimental”.
Yeah, Evan thinks. “Sorry again, that I didn’t greet you,” he offers, in an attempt to stamp his rising guilt.
Daniel flails his arms at him, like he’s battling a fly. Maddie said, once, that he got it from Cathlene, the nurse who looked after him before Evan was born. It makes their mother flinch, but he has kept the habit for thirty years. It also makes him look a little ridiculous.
“Don’t even. It was either you or my luggage, actually. And I’m just glad you could come to dinner,” he says, then smiles unhappily, “Mom told me she had to make you cancel work. So I’m sorry, actually,” and here they go. It’s probably just perfunctory, like things sometimes turn to be, with them, like they’re on the opposite ends of an office table trying to find the best way to drop the discharge news at each other, but it pinches Evan’s nerves all the same. He doesn’t deserve this apology, especially when they’ve just reunited, but it’s Daniel, and it’s not the first time he took the blame not meant for him.
What Daniel doesn’t know can’t hurt him, though, and this would. So Evan laughs it off.
“No, relax. It worked out for the best, actually. I’ll tell you later,” he scrambles up, thankful for the unmistakable sound of their mother’s humming coming up their way. It made him sad that she never agreed to sing lullabies, when he was a child - only sang for herself, and grind his teeth in irritation when he was a teenager and she took a stroll through his room, unannounced, looking for something ot ready to scold him for staying up too late into the evening, sounding like she truly was on a walk. Now the familiarity of it makes him ache.
“Evan, you’re late,” she announces, gracing the room, checking on Daniel as instinctively as he did, pioneer of that. It makes Daniel flinch, made him mad, at some point, but she keeps thirty-year-old habits, too.
She cradles Daniel’s sleeve absentmindedly, on her way to Evan. He gets her frown, but there’s also a smile growing on her face, and she fiddles with his still tousled hair, smoothing it back, straightens the collar of his sweater. Light and efficient, and he catches her pleased look at his garment choice, feels like things will be okay.
“Hi, mom,” he catches her hand, squeezes it a little, gets an admonishing look. Tries to phrase his next words as best as he can, make them pleasing and light-hearted and meaningful in equal measures: “Took it extra slow, in the rain. Sorry.”
She does look pleased: “That’s good, Evan” she says. “I wish you will keep being reasonable. How’s your leg?”
And it would be his own fault that this topic came up if he didn’t know it was inevitable. He can see Daniel, battling gratification with what is probably worry. “Fine,” they need to breeze past it. “My stomach, one the other had,” he makes a show of wincing, moves for the door. “So hungry. Did dad make potatoes? Hey, dad!” he moves.
“Don’t joke like that, Evan!” his mother reminds him, stern, but they do move on to dinner.
He puts a third serving of his parents’ chili on his plate, shocked by how good it actually is.
“It’s the cocoa powder. My special ingredient,” his father says - because Daniel was surprised too, but brave enough to mention it - and promptly ruins the dish. Now Evan feels like he’s munching on pennies, sudden bitterness rearing its head. ‘Sure it is,’ he thinks, fast enough to squeeze it in before he realizes how ridiculous it is to be angry at your father mastering cooking.
“Really, dad, it’s amazing. You should show me the moves some day,” he vomits out. His dad smiles politely in return.
There’s genuine curiosity on his face, though, when he asks: “So the car. Good, isn’t it?”
Evan thinks about the shiny white thing that his father presented him - despite Margaret’s protests that it was too early yet for Evan to drive again. “We would have to buy it for him anyways”, he argued, on a rare occasion his parents disagreed. “Might as well do that before he wastes all his money on another sports one”. So Evan got the one eerily similar to his father’s own one. It is good, though. He can’t really complain about anything.
“Great. Just like you said,” he answers. “Got complimented on it three times just yesterday. Although two of them were by Martin, so maybe he’s kicking me out soon for being cooler than him,” it is kind of ridiculous that Martin, only ever seemingly wearing red and blasting his music for all of the parking lot to hear, at all times of day and night, didn’t think that his sports car was cool. But that is the same man who opened a fitness center to complain about the noise that it causes, ‘can be heard from his office across the hall’, so Evan lost a thread of his logic a while ago.
“And it would be a great loss,” Phillip intones dutifully. “But it is a good car. Better than jeep, too. Hall promised me a good deal if I come again. Doesn’t have to be the same model,” he looks at Daniel. He seems a lot interested in his salad.
“Very thoughtful of you, Pa,” he muses. “But I love the jeep. You picked it for Maddie”.
“Years ago. You can’t possibly run that thing forever, Daniel,” he says in his kindest rendition of irritation. “And it would be suitable, when you get a promotion, to drive something more serious. Evan could drive the jeep, but–”
Sure I could, Evan thinks. He would trade his scared-to-look-up-the-price vehicle for the jeep in a heartbeat. He would trade his sports car for it. But Maddie didn’t leave it to him, even though they still lived in the same town and Daniel was multiple states away. Evan is not the one who earlier that night answered the question, however vaguely, of where she is now, too. There was a time when they were only two people in the house, their parents holding watch over Daniel, but he knows that only because it was told to him, later. What he does remember is being six, riding a bicycle Maddie agreed to unscrew extra wheels from, and the shouting that went down after that. Evan gets hurt, Daniel does, too. He thought of that when his car was thrown off the road, his leg pinned under bended metal.
“If I get a promotion,” Daniel interjects. “It’s tooth and nail right now. I’m not sure I want it, either” he says.
There’s silence, after that, and still quite a lot of food on their plates. Evan sips water and thinks of letting it unfold, but Daniel has to wake up tomorrow to go to the hospital and relive the worst years of his life, check for signs of what he’s spent all his childhood outrunning.
“Yeah, man. If my job took me to Peru and Cali, I’d cling too. I get it,” he says. “Any interesting stories there, by the way?”
“Peru - not really. Not on TV, anyways - cutting floor. LA, yeah. We got to report the shootings,” Daniel says, a little more relaxed.
“Shootings?” is what their mother chooses to say, in the most appalled tone. “You didn’t mention. Why would you go near there?”
“I work on a news channel? And firefighters were shot, not civilians. That was the odd thing,” he says, and really their mother was right. Some things shouldn’t be talked about, or mentioned, or witnessed.
“Who’d want to shoot firefighters?” Evan laughs. It doesn’t feel funny, on his tongue; mostly tastes like blood.
“You’d be surprised. Or not, I guess - ex-police officer. Stray gun, very firm beliefs, obviously the right ones, enough so to kill people, I mean”.
“Someone was killed?” Evan gets out. That’s not right. That doesn’t get to happen.
“Yeah,” Daniel says, very attuned to the wall opposite to him. Evan thinks - fire, sure. Mud, fucking makes sense. Earthquakes, landslides - right, okay. Not bullets. Why on earth would it be bullets. “The first victim. Eddie Diaz. He’s the only one who didn’t make it. Not much else to say? We tried to talk to his captain, after it all ended, but–” He can hear his mother talking about the danger of being a firefighter, like there’s some kind of logic there. He can’t really do much else, keeping himself in his seat and catching snippets of conversation. He must, though - do something else. In a blink, there’re three pairs of horrified eyes, trained on him.
“Evan,” there’s a shriek, a whisper, and stunned silence, all spelling out the same. It must be something with his mouth, because that’s what they’re trained on. He puts the last of him - other parts got lost somewhen along the night - in putting a hand to his lips.
And oh, sure. They come out bloody.
‘That’s not mine,” he wants to say. ‘Don’t you get it? I was wearing a white shirt. I could’ve been– but I wasn’t,” but he can’t push a single word out, because blood takes up all the space, just keeps coming, and it is - he could cry in relief, any other time - his own.
“Blood clots,” he heaves out, finally. “In my– lungs,” he can see the exact moment his mother snaps out of her stupor.
“You knew?” she cries out. “You knew! What were you possibly thinking, Evan–”
And he is so tired already, exhaustion catching on. It would be kinder to fate, now.
“That. I’m sorry,” he says, because at the end of the day, he is. This is an old gnarly open wound. “I’m dying”.
He remembers the rain, when the lighting strikes, and he keeps his eyes locked on Daniel’s, not strong enough to look at other faces. He is pale, and still, and sure as he never was, for Buck. He also sees the question for what it is.
“I don’t know,” he says, simply. “Are you?”
They listen for the thunder.