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Past a certain point, everywhere starts to look the same. Hotel after hotel tumbles together. Skylines blur in memory, and all the names just become one big, messy bundle. Ash has lived two lives, and the second is a lot longer than the first. Shorter’s asleep in the bed next to him, the safest thing Ash has ever woken up to. The planes of his back trace a map he’s all-too familiar with. A way home he couldn’t possibly forget. Shorter looks peaceful, and Ash wonders how he’s possibly comfortable sleeping with something like him so close.
Cape Cod was dreamy; marshes and boardwalks and wide, green fields for the boys to run through. Ash swallows around a memory of his brother’s scrapped postcard-poetry and fiddles with a loose string on the sheet. Griff was careful with his things. He never creased the spines of books when he could avoid it, always dusted every surface and kept his work in tidy piles. Why was someone who was so big always trying to keep himself small? Ash could’ve learned a thing or two from him. He was always messy, always slow to rise, last out the door for school with Griff already waiting in the truck, engine running. His brother was endless patience, an ever-unspooling thread of possibility. He wanted to be a writer. He should’ve gone to college. He should’ve made it out, skipped the draft and lived.
And Griffin was good. He gave too much change at the store and helped the regulars find their way home when the night was looking a little too much like the bottom of a bottle. He’d round up all the neighborhood kids and take ‘em down to the river when it got too hot to do anything but mope and wish for cooler skies. He wasn’t great in school but he had a pretty smile and a long arm, and he taught Ash just about everything he knew. His letters, his numbers, how to know when to pick what from the woods, how to tell when the storm’s gonna get bad and you gotta put towels under the windows. How to catch a ball. How to read the music sheets in church. How to hit a home run. How to skin the rabbit. How to hold a gun -
He taught Ash how to hold a gun.
He taught Ash how to shoot.
Shorter keeps a knife under his pillow. Nadia’s got a bat by the door, and any number of things hidden around the house. Ash tried to stop paying attention when he realized it made her anxious that he knew her safety net. It didn’t stop him from noticing, but it made her breathe a little easier.
In some ways, Ash wonders if that was Griff’s fault. If he hadn’t already been dead, what would he have said? Seeing his seven-year-old son all torn up didn’t summon anything in Jim other than disgust, but the old man never had much empathy to begin with. But Ash knows that’s where his patience would’ve run out. In his heart, he knows Griff would’ve taken one look at him and sent him packing, same as their Da.
Sometimes he deigns to hope otherwise, that maybe his big brother would’ve scooped him up and tucked him in and gone off to do the dark thing himself, but he knows better. The only one who’s ever hurt anyone for Ash is Shorter, and sometimes he doesn’t even believe that. But he’s seen the blood, seen the look in his eye when he comes back late - frayed, like something cut to the wire of his heart. And Ash knows he isn’t easy to love. He doesn’t make it easy.
He tries to, but they just won’t let him. Shorter and Nadia both, they just - they force it to the surface, whatever frail, trembling part of him is still human. And he keeps crawling back to them, every bit the bad dog. He gets mean when he’s scared, too. His teeth show and everything. He knows he’s said horrible, unforgivable things when faced with that sort of unrepentant good.
It’s not for the lack of trying. Ash has probably spent as much time trying not to hurt the Wongs as he’s spent hurting them. He doesn’t know whats worse; the pain they feel when they find out he’s lied, or the mix of disgust and anguish he sees when he’s honest. Telling anyone anything has always felt like pulling teeth. His body knows where it belongs, and tries to hold on when it leaves. Every time they say they’re sorry for something that has nothing to do with them, he feels a hand wrap around his lungs and squeeze.
But it hurts as much to hold it in then it does to spit it out, and they make it seem so easy. Not for Ash. Never for Ash. Ungrateful child, Jim would say. You don’t even know how good you have it. Maybe he should rip some things apart with his teeth. Snarl and bark and bite and see if that won’t make him feel better, if it won’t settle the ache in the pit of his belly.
Shorter shifts in his sleep, bringing himself closer. He’s never been afraid to touch Ash. It never mattered how dirty he was, how contaminated . It didn’t matter. Not to Shorter. Ash feels like five years ago. He feels all of thirteen and bruised knees and hurt, and Shorter moves closer, unafraid even in his sleep. The heat of a pulse next to yours; his brother inhales, wraps around Ash like he’s keeping him afloat. Ash tries not to tense, tries not to breathe in case it’ll wake him up.
Ash used to have this dream when he was younger where he’d wake up in the old farmhouse and it’d be cold enough to see his own breath. He’d shiver under the covers for a few moments, just listening to the wind creak the old beams above him, then pull a blanket around his shoulders and plod downstairs.
The house was empty. This wasn’t uncommon for Ash to wake up to - on mornings when he didn’t have school, Jim was often out early and Griff worked the morning shift to be home in the evenings with Ash. They’d cook dinner, listen to the radio, maybe read something together. But something about this just felt wrong.
“Griff?” He’d call, but the sound never seemed to make it far. “Jim?”
Then, when he got real scared, “Dad?”
But the house was empty, and Ash was alone. So he waited. Hours passed and the shadows grew longer, but nobody came home. Nobody came back for him. He was good - kept watch by the door, didn’t touch Jim’s stuff, didn’t even waste any food. He tried the door, but it was stuck. It was stuck no matter what he tried - banging, prying, kicking it, nothing worked. Someone will come for me, he thought. Griff will come for me.
But nobody opened the door. Nobody let Ash out. He was good, and nobody let him out. The house was so much bigger without them, he realized. There was no escaping its heaviness, the darkness that crept from the corners like frost to nip at his exposed edges.
Ash hasn’t had that dream in years. But every time it gets cold outside he just gets this feeling, like something is coming to swallow him up. (Sometimes he blinks and its 1995 again.) He doesn't have a knack for chasing it away - he's only ever been good at the running and hiding, not so much the confrontation part. That's always been Shorter's thing. God, he loves him so much. Sometimes it feels like betraying what he used to be, )
If Ash were to prescribe a feeling to Shorter Wong, it would be love. He’s never met a person with such an incessant ability to make you feel warm, to enter a room and fill the whole goddamn place with light. Shorter sometimes feels like Griff, and Ash doesn’t believe in anything anymore but sometimes he wonders if that’s who he really is. His brother keeping watch even after he was left behind. Sometimes he sees him out of the corner of his eye, perched golden on the fire escape, a lighter cupped to his mouth –
And sees Griffin sitting on their porch, all too young to emulate their father and too old to put up with the world. It’s so much easier to remember him like that, to pretend he was never ugly or cruel. But Ash was a child, and aren’t you supposed to be nostalgic for childhood? Maybe he will always be seven years old and will never make it out of that house, but he curls up next to Shorter and feels - safe, somehow. And sometimes he wishes they'd met when they were younger, because maybe things would've turned out different. But it fades quickly when he realizes he's glad Shorter never saw him when he was ugly, and that he knows Shorter when he's old enough to know to hit people back.
Loving people, as Ash is learning, is a messy combination of grief and guilt. You are perpetually trying to help; reaching out, offering help, and constantly falling short just before the threshold of need. You are doomed to hate yourself for wounds that were never yours to stop to begin with. You will never be good enough to save anyone, let alone yourself. There is a running inquisition of broken things in his mind and a list of solutions that keep getting crossed out because things keep happening before he is even able to process the previous. Every knot in the string of time is a rock in the bottom of Ash's shoe. He wants to save Shorter, and yet he's right there. He wants them to be okay, but he doesn't even know how okay looks anymore.
How is he meant to make anything right when he doesn't know what went wrong in the first place? Being alive is a terrible thing because he knows that someday, it has to end. Someday he or Shorter will say goodbye and it will be the last time. Sometimes he feels less like a person and more like something violent; an action, an echo, the bitter moment between the knife and the credits when the audience isn't sure how to react. Some people just weren't built for this, his dad used to say.
Was Ash built for this?
He doesn't think so. He doesn't think so, but he also isn't sure if it matters anymore. Not when, despite waking up with cold hands every morning, his friend is lying next to him and he is so, so warm. He wants to overstay his welcome and forget why he ever wanted to leave. He wants to not be so full of grief. He wants to be good. Ash knows hundreds of ways to hurt. He wants to learn a couple more of being soft.