Work Text:
Back when he and Sunny were kids, Kel had had a crush on Sunny. However, back then, he hadn’t realized it until it was too late. Sunny had locked himself up in his house. Kel had a lot of time to himself to think, right after Mari’s death, when Hero layed in bed all day, Aubrey was angry at everyone, and Basil seemed scared out of his mind if anyone even so much as looked at him. Kel realized that he had a crush on Sunny, at the worst time possible.
At first, he didn’t reject the idea, necessarily. He tried knocking on Sunny’s door over and over again. All he needed to do was wait for Sunny to come out of his house, and then he could talk to him about everything. So, Kel decided he would wait for Sunny. …However, he didn’t realize just how long that was going to take.
Kel did his best not to lose hope, even when weeks passed. Even when months passed. On Sunny’s birthday, the year after Mari’s passing, Kel cried on his doorstep, begging the boy to please, please open the door. At that time, it was to no avail. For days, even weeks, afterward, he wondered if Sunny had even heard him out there. Even though he denied it, even to himself, it was clear that his hope was starting to dwindle. However, perhaps it already had been for a while before that.
For a long time, although he refused to say it, he felt that his hope was gone. It wasn’t until years later that he saw him again, when Sunny was meant to be moving away and Kel spent far more time than most would consider usual knocking on that door of his. He knew that it was his last shot. Kel didn’t believe that he’d open the door that day, but he still tried. He knew that it would be wrong not to do so.
And…much to his amazement, Sunny did open the door that day. It was one of the best days he had had in a long time, despite the fights they had with Aubrey. Not only did he get to see Sunny, but he’d also finally come out of his house. It was more than he ever could have asked for.
He assumed that his crush would have gone away after three and a half years. To him it only made sense; Kel felt it would be odd to still have a crush on someone you hadn’t seen in such a long time. However…that wasn’t at all the case. Kel was still very much in love with him, and that seemed to make things a lot more complicated than they were supposed to be.
Even though his feelings had remained, however, that mostly wasn’t the main thing on his mind during those days before Sunny moved away. He was a lot more concerned with how he was doing. Sunny was skinnier than what seemed healthy. He remembered that back when they were kids, Sunny was notably taller than him. Instead, Kel now towered over him. It looked like Sunny had barely grown more than a few inches, if even that.
Now, though? It had been months since then, and it was safe to say that a lot had changed.
Sunny had confessed to him, as well as Aubrey and Hero, that back then…Mari’s death hadn’t been a suicide. The truth was ugly and rotten; it was something that he had never had any real reason to suspect, or even think of. Sunny had, by accident, killed his sister by shoving her down the stairs, and Basil had had the idea of covering it up as a suicide so Sunny wouldn’t get in any sort of trouble. Of course, in reality, it was a lot more complicated than that…but that was the easiest way to word it simply.
Kel ended up doing a lot of wrestling with his feelings after that. For a while, he wasn’t even still sure if he felt for the boy romantically. He knew, though, deep down in his heart somewhere, that he could never truly hate Sunny for what he did. When all of that happened…he was just a kid, and Sunny meant so much to him. It was something that he knew he would never truly be able to understand, at least what came after she died. He was a different person than either of them were, and whatever was really going through his and Basil’s heads back then was something that he would never truly know.
Everyone did keep in touch with Sunny after all of that, though. They wanted to work it out. All of them knew that it was in their best interests.
After spending more time with Sunny, after quite some days of Kel visiting him in the city or Sunny returning to Faraway to see him and the rest of his friends, he was sure that he forgave Sunny for what he had done. And, so, he told him that. That was a day that he knew neither of them would ever forget. Sunny had broken down into tears after Kel told him he forgave him. It wasn’t long after that, either, that Kel cried, too.
Summer had come and gone, and fall did, too. Before he knew it, winter had begun, it was the end of December and a year that had truly been full of ups and downs was now finally coming to an end. If you had asked Kel what he thought 2003 would have in store for him back in January, he wouldn’t have gotten a single thing right, that was for sure.
They’d spent a lot of time together since that fateful day back in the hospital. And…Kel was sure that he still loved him.
⇼
It was December the 31st, 2003. It was undoubtedly cold out, but it wasn’t snowing, and Kel was wearing his favorite orange coat. He hadn’t told his mother that he was leaving before he did so earlier that morning, so there was more than a fair chance that when he got back in trouble. That wasn’t really something that was on his mind at that moment, however. He could deal with that later.
He was walking up the stairs in a building, an apartment complex to be exact, on his way to the third floor. That was where someone he needed to see resided. Of course, it was easy to guess who that was in reference to. Sunny.
Once he was on the right floor, it wasn’t long before he made it to the apartment numbered 311. He took a deep breath, tightening his grip on the bouquet he held with one of his hands. Sunny wouldn’t think this was lame or something, right?
It took him quite some courage to lift his free hand and knock on that door, but he did. It was less than a minute that he had to wait before Sunny answered, peeking at him through the partially opened door. Once he saw who was standing there, though, he opened it up the rest of the way. “Oh, hi, Kel. What are you doing here so early?” Yeah...maybe Kel shouldn’t have been in such a rush. It wasn’t even nine in the morning yet. Oh, well.
“Hey, Sunny..! There’s, uh, actually something I need to tell you…”