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Mario knows what time it is because he’s been looking at the clock every 10 seconds, but he looks again anyway, just to be safe.
Yup. 3:45. Same as last time.
He sighs and shifts in his bed again, thinking that maybe the fourth attempt at lying on his side so he can look out the window will do the trick. He kicks the blankets a little so they pool around his waist instead of his shoulders and props himself up on his elbow, looking out at the stars.
It's funny—they look the same in this universe as they do in Brooklyn. He hadn’t been thinking about it that night in the flower field because he didn’t know there were other stars in this universe, like, capital S Stars with the power to make you fast and strong and cool. Admittedly he had no way of knowing if the stars in the sky here did look like the Superstars, since they were presumably as far away as regular space stars, but there sure were no signs of it from here. Maybe he’d borrow Luigi’s telescope one night to see.
At the thought of his brother he instinctively turns to the corner, even though he knows Luigi’s bed isn’t there because their cute new mushroom house has two bedrooms—plus a guest room for whenever Toad or DK or a family member needs it. It’s weird to get used to that corner having a beanbag chair instead. Maybe Mario should have organized his room a little differently than it was back home so he stopped getting confused like this.
He sits up and rubs his eyes, still looking at the beanbag chair that all muscle memory was telling him should have been Luigi’s bed. Time to cut his losses and try something else. He throws off the covers and opens his door harder than strictly necessary, hoping that letting out his frustration physically will help him somehow. But when he sees that Luigi’s bedroom door is open he slows down and walks with lighter steps—shoot, he probably forgot to close it after checking in on him earlier, after the doctor left.
Luigi is sleeping like he does when he’s really out of it, nestled so tightly and deeply in his blankets that Mario can’t see anything but his hair sticking out the top of the cocoon. The pile of blankets rises and falls with the rhythm of steady, regular breathing, and he’s grateful that at least Luigi is getting a good night’s sleep. He gently closes the bedroom door so he doesn’t accidentally wake his brother before continuing downstairs.
Turning on the kitchen light would ruin the mood, so Mario keeps it off, using just the light from the fridge to pour a glass of milk. He sits at the counter for a minute, taking in the way the moonlight comes through the window and slants across the floor. The darkness and the quiet and the solitude settle around him, draping his shoulders like a blanket, and any second now it’s going to be enough to put him to sleep.
Any second.
Maybe the milk needed to be warm. That was it. Drinking cold milk didn’t work. Had to be warm.
He’s still afraid the lights are going to ruin the mood and wake him up even more, so he uses muscle memory and the slant of moonlight that’s found its way into the kitchen to pour the rest of his milk into his red “M” mug and stick it in the microwave. He watches the seconds tick by and stops the timer right before it goes off—Luigi’s door may be closed but he still doesn’t want to risk it.
There. Warm milk, it’s still dark, it’s still quiet—
Hot
No
CRASH.
Realizing the mug is too hot to grab by anything other than the handle; deciding to power through it anyway because he’s already holding the cup part; and then reflexively opening his hand when his executive function decides that was a stupid thing to do happen sequentially in the span of about 0.2 seconds. The crash of mug against floor rings in his ears
There’s a giant crack after the shell zips past Luigi and hits the base of the column dead center,
as he stares at the mug on the ground, milk seeping out of the shattered ceramic
and then the whole thing comes down, breaking the stones of the bridge underneath it
and spreading across the cracks on the tile,
and nearly drowning out the sound of screeching rubber as Luigi turns the wheel hard to the left
picking up speed like a river that’s just been undammed
followed by a sickening crunch and then Luigi isn’t moving, he’s falling
leaving the white “M,” the only part still intact,
he’s falling he’s falling there’s so much rubble he’s going to die
wobbling on the floor until the momentum
and it’ll be my fault.
finally gives out.
again
Mario lets out a small noise that isn’t quite a scream and isn’t quite a cry. Whatever it is, it’s blessedly quiet, and it’s this lingering subconscious drive not to wake his brother that snaps Mario out of his frozen state. He accepts defeat—no chance of sleeping now—and flips on the kitchen light so he can clean up his stupid little mess.
Broom. The broom. Or should it be towels first? He should get the sharp pieces up and out of the way, but everything will be wet and gross if he doesn’t get to the milk beforehand. But he can’t wipe up the milk with all the pieces laying everywhere. But can brooms even get wet? Why didn’t his mother teach him this? Did she teach him this? Was he not listening when she did? Very possible. Luigi might know, but he’s asleep, and each time Mario reminds himself that Luigi is asleep, it becomes more and more important to keep it that way.
He settles for his hands, reaching down for the biggest piece, the “M.” The fragment has stopped wobbling and the milk has spread under his socks. How long has he been thinking about the broom? The timer on the microwave reads 4:03. He’s been down here for 18 (?) minutes, and he has no idea what part of the 18 minutes has been taken up by any singular activity—getting down here, drinking the cold milk, heating up the milk, dropping the mug, staring. Oh god, what portion of these 18 minutes has just been staring? He should have kept looking at the clock every 10 seconds. Maybe he had been looking at the clock every 10 seconds and still didn’t know. Oh god—
“So. What are we doing here?”
Mario looks up—he’s still crouching, the “M” shard dripping more milk onto his socks, and Luigi is crouching across from him, elbows resting on his knees and head cocked off to the side. His bedhead hair is sticking straight up, and his eyes are narrowed with both sleep and confusion. He raises an eyebrow in expectation when Mario doesn’t answer.
But Mario is too busy blue-screening to have any sort of response. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out, because there’s too much—and also nothing at all—going on in his head at once. The car crash, the mug crash, he’s so tired, it’s so late, the light hurts, Luigi was here, how long had Luigi been here, he tried so hard not to wake him up—
Luigi reaches across the carnage and gently takes Mario’s hand. “Let’s get this cleaned up.” He stands, pulling Mario along with him, and then takes the “M” shard out of his hand and places it on the counter.
The motion rouses Mario just enough that he’s finally able to say words. “I’m so sorry; I woke you up, didn’t I?”
Luigi starts gently kicking the bigger shards away from the wettest area of the floor. “I heard the crash, yeah. But it’s OK. Couldn’t sleep?”
“How’d you know?”
“You’re in the kitchen at 4 am with a broken mug of milk. Unless you do this all the time and I just didn’t know about it, that’s the only conclusion I can make.”
Mario laughs, painfully and awkwardly. “Yeah.”
Luigi looks up at the noise, frowning, as he opens the drawer where they keep all their extra kitchen towels. “Why don’t you sit down?”
“What?” Mario shakes his head. “No, let me help. This is my fault.” He swallows, but it’s more like a gulp. “You should be asleep anyway. Do we need—can brooms get wet?”
“What?”
“Like. Should I have gotten the broom?”
Luigi looks earnestly, seriously thoughtful. “I don’t know. Maybe? But actually maybe not? They’re so bristly. It would take forever to dry.” He leans down with a towel to scoop up the larger pieces in the group he had set apart. “This is probably easier? I was just gonna wipe up what I could and then use the vacuum.”
“Wait, no! I said I’d do it,” Mario grabs Luigi’s arm and tries, gently, to pull him to his feet.
Luigi wiggles his arm to shake Mario off. “No, it’s fine. I almost got it.” He uses the arm he just freed from Mario to push the towel in towards his other hand, consolidating the sopping bundle as much as possible and then pushing himself into a standing position while Mario continues to hover over him. “See? Now we just have to wipe the milk up a little and then we can vacuum.”
“OK, but—you go sit down, OK? I’ll get the vacuum.”
“Okey dokey,” Luigi says, opening the folded-up towel into the garbage and shaking it to dislodge the pieces of ceramic clinging to the fabric.
“Good. I’ll be right back.”
Mario is grateful he doesn’t have to tiptoe anymore and that he can turn on the light in the hall closet because he never would have found the vacuum otherwise. But then again, he never would have thought of using the vacuum. Of course the broom was too bristly. What was he thinking? He shakes the cobwebs out of his head, and, though he is grateful that Luigi has just made this whole process a lot easier, hopes he can convince him to go back to bed.
When he returns to the kitchen with the vacuum, Luigi is wringing another wet towel into the sink, and the floor is mostly dry and free of all but the smallest pieces of wreckage.
“You said you were going to sit down!”
“I lied,” Luigi said, and then the microwave—which Mario hadn’t even realized was humming in the background—goes off, and Luigi takes out his green “L” mug, a single wisp of steam curling out from inside. He had taken the mug by the handle but then shifts it in his hands so that he’s holding it by the cup part, then holds it out to Mario with the handle facing outward. “Here. You always heat it up too long. If you don’t heat it up too long or you grab it by the handle, you’re fine. You somehow do both things wrong.”
Mario doesn’t respond right away, so Luigi holds the mug out a little farther. “Come on. I’ll trade you. Milk for a vacuum. Completely normal exchange of goods and services.”
And then Mario cries for about the 80th time that day.
“Oh geez—” Luigi puts the mug on the counter, spilling a little milk over the rim with the suddenness of the movement. “It’s that kinda night, huh?” Luigi uses his now free arms to pull Mario into a hug.
Mario reciprocates immediately, leaning his head against Luigi’s shoulder and hugging him back. “I love you,” he says, sobbing into his brother’s pajamas.
“I love you, too. You ready to sit down now?”
Mario nods, wiping his eyes and following Luigi, who’s guiding him by the arm like a toddler, into the living room. Luigi had apparently grabbed the milk on the way because once Mario is sitting down the warm mug is being pushed into his hands. “There. The perfect drinkable temperature.”
Mario, still feeling like a toddler, sniffles and takes a sip. Luigi’s right—it’s the perfect temperature. He feels a lot more settled as the milk warms him up from the inside, the thing he’d been hoping for from the start without the blistering cup and the traumatic flashback.
“Better?”
Mario doesn’t realize until he’s finished his sip—actually, it had turned into more of a gulp, he’s almost drained it by now—that Luigi is rubbing his back. It feels nice.
“Yeah,” he says. “How long did you heat it up for?”
“A minute and 20 seconds.”
“That’s not long enough,” Mario sulks.
“Au contraire mon frére,” Luigi says, taking the mug out of Mario’s hands with a smirk. “You just drank the whole thing.”
“It feels like it shouldn’t be long enough,” Mario sulks, again, more sulkily. “Was I really gone that long looking for the vacuum?”
“Oh, yeah, I knew you’d never be able to find it that fast.”
“Wow,” Mario says. Immediately after it comes out he can hear Luigi—
“Uh, ok, wow”
—light and teasing, just like Mario had said it just now, but voice croaking with exhaustion and water, and he almost wishes the déjà vu hadn’t hit him so fast, but it’s hard to avoid when Luigi is still rubbing his back like Mario had been doing to him hours earlier and—
“Wow,” Mario says again, for some reason, and his voice is croaking this time, and then the déjà vu hits for a third (fourth?) time because Luigi is pulling him into another hug.
“Hey, hey,” Luigi nearly croons. “What’s the matter?”
Mario knows he shouldn’t be leaning against Luigi’s torso but can’t quite bring himself to pull away. “Doesn’t this hurt?”
Luigi scoffs. “Whatever that little Toad doctor gave me is—” Mario feels Luigi move an arm and knows, even though he can’t actually see from this angle, that Luigi has his thumb and forefinger in the A-OK sign. “—top-notch stuff. Can’t feel a thing.”
“Really? So this doesn’t hurt?” Mario confirms, very, very gently poking Luigi’s ribcage through his green pajamas.
“Nope.” Luigi looks almost cocky with his tired, satisfied smile and with the way his hair is sticking straight up. “I feel like we should tell someone about this? Like where was this stuff when I fell out of the treehouse?”
“The sewers, apparently.”
“Should have known.”
“Should have known,” Mario repeats. He lets a little more of his body weight sag against Luigi, allowing himself to get heavier the more seconds pass without any sounds of protest or involuntary flinches from his brother. “Do you ever…” he gulps. “Regret coming here?”
“Coming where?”
“The Mushroom Kingdom,” Mario says, flatly, not hiding the incredulity that he even has to specify.
“Oh.” Luigi’s voice is full of such genuine surprise that, were Mario actually mad to begin with, he would have immediately forgiven him. But the thoughtful realization appearing on Luigi’s face only makes it more obvious how tired he is. There are dark circles and tiny furrows that can’t be anything but exhaustion under his eyes, which look like they’re struggling against some undefined weight. His color is fine and he doesn’t look like he’s in pain, but the general aura is so heavy and sallow that Mario knows it was a mistake not to send Luigi back to bed immediately.
“Nevermind, Lu. Let’s go back to—”
Luigi laughs and turns slightly, grabbing Mario’s arm mid-sentence. “You know, it didn’t occur to me that ‘here’ was a place. That I could come to. That’s why I was confused. Because I’ve always been here. It’s home. That’s how it feels.”
Mario, in the starting position of moving himself off the couch, freezes. “But—”
“We’ve only been here, like, a month? The public transit system is warp pipes? There are blocks that fall out of the sky? I’ve almost died, like, three times? I know!” Luigi’s voice cracks with sleep and something akin to exhilaration. “And it’s home. How did that happen?” He scoff-laughs to himself. “The Luma was right. Kind of.”
“The Luma?”
“The little star thing in the dungeon. I wasn’t a fan of the whole ‘this dungeon is now your home’ thing in the moment, but, in a roundabout way, that’s what happened. One point to Luma.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that to get here,” Mario says quietly.
Luigi, perhaps because he’s dazed and confused, or perhaps because Mario has been underestimating him all this time, simply shrugs. “You went through a lot more.”
Mario isn’t quite sure that’s true but he sputters out the first thing he can think of. “Yeah, but that was karma.”
“Karma.”
“I had to fix the problem! It was my fault we were down there in the first place, and—and—”
Luigi looks like he’s about to say something but hesitates at the last second and instead waits for Mario to finish whatever he’s saying. Which is difficult, because the tears are coming back, and words are getting harder to force through. “And it’s my fa—I nearly ki—”
Luigi jumps back in once Mario starts struggling to breathe, rubbing his older brother’s back again. “Mario, the sewers were a dangerous place to go, but how could we have known they were warp pipe to a different dimension levels of—”
“Not then!” The exclamation comes out a lot louder than he intends because of the sheer force required to get the words past the cry-hiccups. “Today—the, the shell, I—you almost drowned—it’s not even---a turtle thing that would have—it would have been me—you would have—”
In a mirror mode of this afternoon, Mario is leaning against Luigi, hugging him as tight as he can without hurting him. “Sometimes I—I’m so scared—”
“You can’t be scared all the time.” Luigi’s voice is dripping with self-satisfaction.
“Shut up—”
“I’m serious! What happened to ‘I’m proud of you for scaring me’?”
“I am proud,” Mario says into the fabric of Luigi’s pajama shirt. “And I’m scared. All of it’s true at the same time.”
“And that’s why you can’t sleep, huh?”
Mario nods.
“You are just like Mom.”
“Shut up.”
“No. This is funny for me.”
Mario groans and leans further into Luigi’s pajama shirt. Not looking at his brother, and feeling the rise and fall of his chest, emboldens him to ask again. “You promise you don’t regret coming here?”
“Mario, I regret every choice I’ve ever made except two.” Luigi pushes Mario off of him so he can look him in the eye, which is rude, because it’s a very Mario move. Then he uses his other hand to hold up an index finger. “One, quitting Spike’s wrecking crew to strike out on our own,” he says. Then he puts up another index finger. “And two, moving here.”
Mario has no idea how he’s the twin who got the reputation for being brave. And how Luigi is the twin who got the reputation for crying all the time, because Mario’s about to surpass that record if he hasn’t already in the last 24 hours. But he does know that, minutes later, after Luigi’s shirt is wet again, and he’s falling asleep just like how Luigi used to fall asleep against him after a bad day, that he’s got the coolest, bravest, most wonderful brother in the whole world. And that Luigi will be there when he wakes up, the way he’s supposed to be.