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Maru couldn’t stop the flinch from escaping as her father slammed his cup on the table. He and Sebastian were fighting again. At this point she couldn’t even keep up with what they fought about, she just tried to stay out of the way, but was currently stuck with a half-finished plate of spaghetti and a long lost appetite.
They never used to fight. Up until the past couple of years Maru thought they were a happy family. One that never had troubles and rarely argued. But then Sebastian grew closer to graduating high school, and he got his job on the computer, and he joined Sam’s band. And Demetruis was happy about his interest in computers, thought he could go to a fancy state college and study computer science, but that was never what Sebastian wanted. He didn’t like high school as it was, he didn’t want to spend another four years in school and then another ten working at some company with no say in what kind of work he did.
Maru could understand that. Demetruis didn’t.
He had never really understood Sebastian, then again he never really tried. Maru had always been good at science, and had always had that connection with her dad. Sebastian just…didn’t. He thought microscopes were hard to see through, they hurt his eyes, he wasn’t interested in categorizing the habits bugs present when he flipped over a rock, he just wanted to see them living their lives, wanted to see them free. Demetrius never figured out how to meet him halfway.
Maru noticed Sebastian growing more distant when the house burned down. Her dad’s lab hadn’t had quite the proper safety equipment yet and he’d been too excited about his new experiment to wait for it, so he cranked the bunsen burner and the walls came crashing down. Somehow, they were able to get the important stuff out of the house before it went down, so it wasn’t a total loss, but they’d had to live with the grandpa who owned the town farm for a couple of weeks while her mother rebuilt the place.
When designing the new place, Robin asked the kids what they wanted their rooms to look like, being the architect meant they could have whatever they wanted, and Sebastian had asked for a basement room. He’d wanted one so bad, back then. He’d just discovered emo music and thought it would be cool for his room to look like a dungeon.
None of them thought it would have the consequences it did.
Sebastian stayed in bed more often, took meals in there and brought the dishes out after, he took up smoking as a habit and snuck out most nights. Maru knew her mom was trying to help him as much as she could, but they didn’t have the money to add a room to their house and Sebastian insisted that he liked the basement room. Demetrius seemed to notice the change, but didn’t know what to do, so he did what he thought would motivate him.
A few months after moving into their new house, Demetrius started pushing Sebastian to “make something of himself”, to go out into the world and find what spoke to him. But, he’d never quite get the inflections right. Maru could read between the lines and understand what he was trying to say, could tell when he was meaning to be sarcastic based on the way his hands moved when he spoke, but Sebastian and him had never had the best relationship. Every comment was met with a rebuttal, until they were at each other’s throats more often than not.
Demetrius thought he was only trying to help, step up as a step dad in ways he should have a long time ago, but was met with resistance and quips every step of the way.
Sebastian felt like he couldn’t leave his room without having some complaint launched his way, but he also couldn’t help but notice that not leaving his room left him depressed and low on energy. He wished he’d asked his mom to put a window in at least instead of relying on the lights on the walls, or at least some sort of vent to let some fresh air in. But the days went by and the little energy he had was sapped by his remote job and shouting matches with his step father.
Which is where she was left, now. Sitting between her brother and her father while they screamed at each other. Robin had stopped getting in the middle of the arguments, they’d both figured out a while ago that putting themselves in the middle of it just made them say things they didn’t mean and overall caused more damage. She laid an apologetic hand on top of Maru’s and then gathered dishes to wash.
At this point, Maru would usually just go to her own room. Work on a project she was calling MarILDA or walk to Penny’s house or try to go to bed early if she had a shift at the clinic the next day.
But she’d been pushing her anger and fear and sadness down for months . She’d been ignoring all the signs of her family breaking apart and tried to keep going. She loved her projects, they were like her own children, but she couldn’t do it anymore.
Sebastian stood up too quickly and the chair fell over behind him. The sound startled Maru into letting out the sob that had been trapped in her throat for the better part of ten minutes. The yelling stopped. She could see how her dad’s eyes softened when he looked at her and she hated it. She hated how Demetrius could only see the best in her and the worst in Sebastian. She hated how he always felt the need to make things okay for her. She hated how much he would talk about her accomplishments and still look down on his step-son for having different interests.
Demetrius leaned towards her and she scooted her chair back. It made a loud scraping noise as it moved across the hardwood floors, and she couldn’t take it anymore. She bolted. She ran for her room, but didn’t stop there. She hastily made it to the side door in her room, where she kept her telescope, and escaped into the fresh air.
She ran up the hill, and kept running past the spa and train station, ran all the way up to the peak of the mountain. It was finally quiet. Not the suffocating silence of an argument that got interrupted, not the overwhelming noise of shouting and dishes being washed and cups being set down too hard. The air was fresh and cold and biting and slightly damp from the rain the night before. The clouds had dissipated and the stars shone down on her as if they knew she needed comfort right then. The moon was just over a quarter full and gave off enough light for her to locate the bench and sit down on it.
She cried.
She cried until there was no energy left in her body. Sobs wracked her chest until she couldn’t breathe. She hugged her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, the cold starting to get to her now that the adrenaline was wearing off.
“Families are rough, huh?” A voice said from behind her.
She lowered her feet to the ground and turned, seeing the man who lived in a tent behind their house. Linus, her mom once told her. She never really talked to him, never wanted to bother him, he seemed content in how he lived and she didn’t want to interfere.
“Uh, yeah, I guess.”
He nodded, not taking offense in her trepidation. She noticed he was holding a steaming cup of something.
“You, uh, have some experience in that department?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Not so much anymore, but, yeah. It’s not easy being the witness, trying not to pick sides and wanting to show them that they're both right, but also both wrong. Sometimes they’re saying the same thing but can’t hear the other person.”
He held the cup out to her.
“It’s chilly, have some cocoa. You’re always welcome to sit by my fire if you need to get warm, or just get away from people for a second. You can talk or we can sit in silence.”
She took the cup, letting out a breath of relief as the drink warmed her cold hands.
Linus smiled at her as he turned away.
“Don’t forget to give that mug back, though!” He called as he made his way down the mountain.
Maru sipped on the drink, staring up at the stars. Her family used to come up here to have picnics and camp in the summers, running around the train station trying to find things that might have fallen off or chasing the squirrels that would always run up the trees before they could be grabbed.
She remembered the nights where the ground was a little too hard, where the air was a little too chilly and she left her tent to sit on the same bench she sat on now. She remembered trying to be quiet, trying not to wake up her parents or brother, but finding Sebastian already awake.
It was those nights that he first explained to her what stars were, and how constellations were formed, and she grew fascinated with space. He told her that people had landed on the moon, and they were discovering more about Mars and the other planets every day, and how you could see them closer with a telescope.
Sebastian was only a few years older than Maru, but that meant that he could learn about space in school when she didn’t have much of a science class. He would go to school every day and take as many notes as he could, then show Maru what he learned because he knew how much she loved it. They would sneak out to the backyard and he would show her the constellations and tell her that people who lived thousands of years ago saw pictures of the stars and they couldn’t see them anymore because there were fewer stars in the sky.
He comforted her when she got sad that she couldn’t see as many stars, he told her that she could be the one to discover new ones.
Robin and Demetrius bought her a telescope for her twelfth birthday. At that point, she had been spending more time in the lab and helping her dad collect samples, while Sebastian discovered his love for fantasy role-playing games. She spent hours looking at the sky in her telescope, learning everything she could about the universe, taking a second interest in robotics so that she might be able to explore more of it with her own technology.
She took another sip of her cocoa. It was slightly cooled off and the chill was starting to set into her bones. She would need to go back inside soon. Or maybe she could avoid it a bit longer by sitting by Linus’s fire. She just didn’t want to open the side door and hear yelling from down the hall like she hadn’t even left.
She was startled out of her thoughts when a stick snapping sounded behind her. At first, she thought it might be Linus, coming back for his cup. Instead it was Sebastian, bundled up in his coat and holding the blanket from his bed.
“Oh my Yoba, Maru it’s freezing out here.” He shivered under his coat as he draped the blanket across her shoulders.
She set the empty cup down next to her and wrapped the blanket around herself, stopping the chill from seeping further.
“How did you find me up here?”
“Eh, Demetrius was convinced you were in your room. After all, you didn’t run out the front door. Luckily for him, I know you just a bit better than that.”
It wasn’t the first time Sebastian had found her after a fight. She usually didn’t make such a big deal out of leaving, or run quite as far, choosing instead to slip out quietly while people were yelling or storming out after an argument of her own. He always found her staring at the stars, looking for the images in the constellations, wishing she could see them how the ancient peoples did.
“He and I talked. Like…without yelling. We decided I would start at a computer science trade school. That way I’m not stuck in a classroom and can go at my own pace, but I have a degree that will open some doors in the field. I…I get that he just wants the best for me, and I think we both realized that the way we were going about it was just hurting you and mom and each other. He seemed to understand that I’m not like you and him, I guess I’ve always been my mother’s son.
“By the way I think she’s trying to add something to my room like you have, a window big enough for me to sneak out of. Fire exit, she said.”
He sat next to her and she leaned against him. If having a big reaction was all she needed to do to get them to finally talk like people then she would have done it long ago, but deep down she knew it needed to get to that point before they could. She had stopped listening to what they said while they were fighting, but she doubted that they both didn’t say something during the fight that got them on equal footing. Something just needed to break the tension so they could calm down.
They didn’t go in immediately. Sebastian asked about how her work was going in discovering a star, and with her robotics, and she talked his ear off while he tried to understand as best as he could. He paid attention, but he just wasn’t science minded like she was.
It was okay, they would be okay. The next day Demetrius would make pumpkin soup (Robin’s recipe, of course) and Sebastian would pick up some strawberries at the store. Olive branches, as it were.
And if Maru stole some of the strawberries and ran away, prompting a chase through the house that (barely) didn’t break any lab equipment, that was okay.
They would be okay.