Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thing to crumple was the hood of the car, though Julian would later forget that. Really, as he woke up in the hospital, he remembered almost nothing of the afternoon. Perhaps that was for the better. 

The only thing keeping him from the ghastly sight by his side, after all, was a bleach white partition, behind which lay his stepsister. Kyoko was a girl just a smidge older than him, and as of an hour ago, his roommate. The nurses had brought her in some twenty or thirty minutes ago, and though at the time she had been half-asleep and crying, now Julian could only hear her staggered breath behind the curtain. 

Squinting under the fluorescent lights, Julian tried to tune out the sound. 

He thought maybe he would find an answer in the humming bulbs overhead, that if he looked into them long enough, he would remember how he wound up there in the first place. Turning to the clock, he felt a sharp pain in the front of his head, and bit down gently on his tongue. 

It was almost two in the afternoon, now—that meant it had been a full day since they had left Tittenhurst, but he couldn’t be sure, and almost didn’t want to find out. 

Well, someone was sure to know. 

Fear swelled in his heart as he reached for the partition, his fingers hesitating in front of the starched white cloth. 

“Kyoko?” he called, slamming his eyes shut as he pulled away the curtain.

He received no answer, only the familiar beat of the lights above him. So, curling his fingers on the edge of his bed, sitting on his knees, Julian leaned over his stepsister’s half of the room and drew in a deep breath. A little bit louder, now: “Kyoko?”

Still, nothing. 

At last, Julian pried his eyes open, and what he saw made him sick to his stomach. The girl looked dead between her sheets, her cheeks clutching onto their last bit of color for dear life. She seemed to be asleep, and yet periodically, it seemed that her eyes would lift open at their base, the way broken roller blinds snap up when you’re not looking, and blink. 

But that didn’t trouble Julian, at least not then. No, what scared him was the jagged, patchwork line on her face, a row of bright red stitches that made the girl look like one of Dr. Frankenstein’s creations, a curve parallel to her right eyebrow, a desperate attempt to piece her skin back together.

Julian screamed at the sight, a harsh metal scraping sound echoing down the hall as he threw the curtain back into place. 

Against his best efforts, thick, hot tears welled in the corners of his eyes, and somehow, the sensation only made him more frightened. Not knowing what else to do, he leapt out of bed and reached for the doorknob, only for it to open the second he approached it. 

A nurse grabbed him tightly beneath the armpits like a little dog, scolding him for trying to get out of bed, speaking over his muddled, tear-filled explanation. He was still in shock, she warned, and needed to lay down as soon as possible, lest he faint and crack his skull open on the floor.

How was he supposed to lay back down, he tried to ask, though the words dissolved on the edges of his teeth? How was he supposed to stay calm when he couldn’t even remember what had brought him to the hospital, when his sister looked like a banged-up cricket ball? 

All of these things he tried to express, and all of them in vain. 

Staring up at the ceiling, the lights no longer buzzed above him, though they shone brighter than ever; instead they pounded in his head like a hammer on an anvil, worming their way into his ears, taunting him for daring to look. 

After an eternity, the nurse returned with a glass of water and, curiously, a visitor. His head propped up on a pillow, a paper cup sliding into his hand, Julian’s eyes darted to the doorway, where his father now leaned with his hand against a piece of gauze, a bandage covering his chin.

“You’re alright, kid,” he sighed, his voice sick and groggy. “Kyoko, too, she’s just been knocked out from the anesthesia.” 

Julian shook his head, still at a loss for words.

“What happened, then?” his father laughed. “Didn’t anyone tell you not to look?”

“I-I thought I saw her eyes open… I thought—”

“Everything’s fine, Jules. Kyoko’s fine. Everyone’s fine.”

The boy sniffled. “But the curtain—”

“Forget about it. You’ve learned your lesson now, haven’t you?”

Julian squinted, and in response, his father sighed. 

 “Don’t look behind the curtain,” he warned, exhausted. “Because you’re not going to like what you see.” 

Chapter Text

The apartment was cozy at the best of times, and suffocating at the worst, a diamond in the rough on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was tiny with claustrophobic stairways and the offensive smell of pollution, but it had a perfect view of the river, and to Julian, it was a red-brick castle. 

Summer 1974 was winding down, and in a week, he would be back in Wales. 

Sometimes, after the sun sank under the water, in that witching hour before he could fall asleep, he wondered whether that was a blessing or a curse. 

His father had moved in with May almost a year ago, and had moved back to New York only a few months earlier. The East Coast seemed to do his father good, Julian thought; so far that summer, he had only woken up once to his father’s belligerent drunken screaming, or the sound of shattered porcelain behind May’s sobs. 

Anything, he supposed, was better than the stories from California. 

Once, when no one else was listening, May told him that someone tried to shoot his father in the recording studio. 

“He missed,” she sighed, dragging her cigarette. “Thank God. He just shot in the air, but he was so out of his head at the time, I thought he might have actually hit him…” Then, noticing Julian’s wide eyes, she was quick to add, “He didn’t mean to hurt him, God… see, Phil was trying to produce the record, and… Oh, I- I have no excuse for him, but the session wasn’t coming along. I guess he just blew his top, you know?”

Julian didn’t know, but he went along with it anyway, and counted his blessings.

That summer, more or less, was the first time he had seen his father since he was six years old, and he knew better than to ask for more than he deserved. Hell, look what happened to Oliver Twist. 

It was a dull novel, and yet, at his mother’s request, Julian had dragged it across the ocean with him, if only for the sake of reading something. In fact, he had just perched himself on the stairwell to try and finish it when the doorbell rang. Always a shy child, he quickly evacuated the scene, ran to his bedroom, and shut the door behind him. 

Castle though it was, the apartment was cramped, and had the acoustics to match. Julian’s next two minutes were filled with the echoes of small talk bouncing off of the walls like vagabond tennis balls: John! Paul! Linda! May! How are you? Good. Like your dress. Cut your hair? Sure did. Cigarette? No thanks.

If John Lennon and Paul McCartney hated each other as much as the magazines said, it certainly didn’t sound like it. 

Calculating his next move, Julian supposed he had fewer problems with Paul than with his own father, but that childlike fear of being seen nevertheless kept him from leaving the room—

If small talk echoed, then the sound of his father calling his name was enough to deafen the entire state of New York. 

“Julian! Come down here and say hello!” 

Looks like his father had made the decision for him. For a moment, Julian considered pretending to fall asleep and ignoring the request, a rebel without a cause, but soon thought better of it and swung open the door. 

After Paul and Linda’s customary remarks about how much taller the boy had gotten, Julian spent the next few minutes sinking into the wallpaper. This was a limbo familiar to all children when guests came over, the purgatory between leaving and staying put, only to bore oneself to death. 

But just as Julian could turn on his heels and slink away, the conversation took a much more interesting, remarkably more indecent turn. Between clicks of his lighter, his father suddenly broached the hell of a topic that were the two absent Beatles—or, in his own words:

“Now, what’s this about George shagging Ringo’s wife?”

Linda rapidly cleared her throat as Julian’s eyebrows raised, and in a near-manic tone of voice, she decided she could no longer wait to see the cats, and needed Julian to direct her to them immediately. Before Julian knew it, he and Linda were sitting upstairs in his bedroom, the kittens invading their laps exhausted from a day of feline shenanigans. Linda laughed as Minor’s purring trickled up her spine, though she kept herself quiet, so as not to disturb her. 

While the cat dozed off on her skirt, Linda took in her surroundings and sighed. “I didn’t know you had a goldfish.”

Julian perked up. “Well, I haven’t had him too long. I won him at the fair.”

“Does he have a name?”

“My mum said if I named him, I’d get attached.”

Linda furrowed her brow. “I thought that was the point of having pets.”

“Yeah, maybe, but goldfish don’t do well on airplanes.”

“Well, true… will he stay with your dad then?”

“Probably not.”

“Then what’ll happen to him?” Linda asked, concerned. “I mean, he’s got a life of his own, right?”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” Julian sighed, wincing as Major nipped his finger. “All we do is stare at each other. I look at him, and he looks back, but I don’t think he actually sees me, you know? It’s all pretty strange.”

“Well, that’s the thing about goldfish.” Linda sat up. “All animals, actually. He sees you alright, Jules. He just can’t tell you that. But because he can’t get his point across, people assume he doesn’t have a point in the first place. That must hurt, don’t you think?”

Julian frowned, his head sore at the idea. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Linda dropped the topic then, shifting her attention back to the kittens. 

But Julian never stopped thinking about the unnamed goldfish, even when the summer ended and he plopped the creature into the Hudson River. 

What a strange life, he thought, to live in a goldfish bowl, trailing the eyes of strangers who barely realized you were alive, but powerless to tell them anything. 

Even if the goldfish could speak, Julian had a sinking feeling that no one would care to listen. 

Chapter Text

The whole affair would later be recorded on the back of his father’s next album: “ On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O. ” 

Julian was scheduled to leave the next day, his school uniform washed and neatly folded on his wardrobe at home, while in New York, his bedroom was a hair away from empty. The curtains had been closed, the unnamed, all-seeing, voiceless goldfish dumped unceremoniously into the harbor to roam free and wild. All that remained was a poster of Marc Bolan on the cover of The Slider, hanging on the door with a vacant, monochromatic expression. 

Julian had only one chapter left of Oliver Twist , and sitting on top of his packed suitcase, he made good work of it. 

The sun had sunk below the horizon, and yet the boy was far from tired, turning pages like a horse on a carousel while the kittens fought and played in the hallway. 

He couldn’t tell where his father or May had ran off to, though he recalled hearing a door close some twenty minutes before. No matter. At his age, Julian found it somewhat exhilarating to be left home alone, stranded in the Wild West of everyday life to fight such terrors as phone calls and package deliveries. 

Lost in this thought, he found himself milling over the same sentence several times, and cursed himself for it. 

He was interrupted in his pursuit by a sound shrill and panicked, a cry more suitable for Major or Minor than an adult human being. 

“Good God!” his father shouted, halfway between joy and horror. “What is that ?!”

Julian squinted. 

Ordinarily, such expressions would not phase him; he was sure his father had seen much worse than whatever he found in that moment. No, what confused the boy was the fact that the sound came from directly above his head.

“Look at it!” May gasped, her voice obscured through the ceiling. “Oh my God!”

Curious (and admittedly bored by Oliver’s shenanigans), Julian unlocked his window, and with a swift, hard push, opened it far enough to land on the fire escape, his socks clanging against the rusting metal stairs. 

“What’s going on?” he asked, looking back to ensure the cats hadn’t crawled out with him. 

His father turned around, his hands on his hips as May brushed hair away from her face, her head leaned all the way back, staring at the sky. 

“Something’s up there,” he muttered, incredulous. “And it doesn’t look right at all.”

“What, like a plane?”

May shook her head. “Well— well, I thought it was, at first, but it wasn’t the right shape.”

Hearing that, Julian’s face contorted, scrunching up the way it did when he left a tea bag in too long and ended up with a mouthful of tannins. “Was it Superman?”

Then, grinning, his father said a sentence Julian had never heard before, and with any luck, would never hear again.

“I think it was a goddamn alien…”

For a moment, the boy said nothing, too stunned to form a single word. 

“I’m sorry?” he finally asked, tilting his head.

“No,” May hummed, her voice high-pitched as ever. “I think you’re right, I- I don’t know what else it could have been!”

His father bit down hard on his cigarette. “I mean, it was a flying saucer … doesn’t get much clearer than that.”

“You’re lying,” Julian laughed. “Aliens don’t exist.”

His father turned to him, hearing that, and with utter seriousness, urged, “Damn right they do. There was one in the White House just last year.” 

“President Nixon?”

“Well, he sure as hell looks like one!”

At the tender age of eleven, Julian knew little about American politics and cared even less. But there was something in the way his father said the line, something bitingly personal and  yet so juvenile that the boy couldn’t help but laugh.

Once that barrier had been crossed, he found the rest relatively simple. 

Setting himself down on the roof, he stared into the sky with the others, convincing himself—if only for that moment—that the story was true. 

Aliens existed and the last light of the setting sun would shine forever, an eternal dusk. 

His father and May were happy together, and would stay that way for a long time. 

Maybe, in the deepest corners of his mind, Julian’s father even loved him. 

It would take him a few more years to realize the gravity of that thought, to fully understand how wrong he had been. 

The U.F.O., like everything else, was just another trick of the light. 

Chapter Text

1979 marked Julian’s sixth summer in New York, and with any luck, it would be his last. 

Whatever rose colored glasses he had been wearing slipped off the second May was cut out of the picture, when the ‘Lost Weekend’ ended and reality smacked the boy, then twelve, clear across the face. 

The last time May ever saw his father was at a blasted dentist’s appointment, and since then, not a word. But abandonment was always the man’s superpower, Julian mused, staring blankly at the television, wasn’t it?

Age brought wisdom, so the adage said, but Julian was sixteen and felt dumb as ever. He had been naive to think the good times would last forever, to even wonder whether his father cared about him. 

All the proof he needed to realize his father didn’t give a damn was sitting on the rug in front of the television, trying and failing to play with one of the cats.

Julian found out about his half-brother, now just shy of four, from a newspaper. At a distant twelve years older than Sean, Julian found it laughably pointless to harbor a grudge against a toddler. He had also discovered that regardless of its efficacy, it was, in fact, possible to be jealous of a small child. 

It wasn’t Sean’s fault, of course. Truthfully, Julian was sure that in ten years, the boy would resent his family just as much as he did, if not more. If he had nothing else at all, Julian had the advantage of distance; he had only so much free time, and apart from summers and the occasional holiday, he spent what few moments of peace he had in Wales with his mother. 

Sean, for better or worse, was stuck in the Dakota with their father and Yoko.

What a combination, the young man thought to himself. And it was no hyperbole to suggest that Sean was trapped in the building with his family. After his birth, the boys’ father had made a whole show of his new life. That is to say, he had retired from music indefinitely to become a househusband. The implication was that he had never been a father before, that he had finally stepped up to the task.

Bullshit, Julian thought. He had been a father for sixteen years, and had spent the entirety of that time running away from the fact. 

What his father didn’t tell the press, at least not directly, was that he hadn’t changed. He hadn’t had some grand revelation and decided it was time for him to retire to domestic life; otherwise he would have apologized to Julian, and the most the young man got in the way of remorse was being offered a blunt. 

Really, it was Sean who was different, who was defined solely by the fact that he wasn’t a screw-up or a mistake, that if nothing else, he wasn’t Julian. That was what made the boy palatable, maybe even lovable—and that was the most searing pain Julian ever felt. 

He chewed on this thought like sour candy as the Neighborhood of Make-Believe sparkled on the television, though his half-brother paid no mind to it. In fact, at precisely that moment, Sean spun his head around and gazed vacantly at Julian’s shoes. 

“What?” the young man asked, frustrated. “Don’t stare, it’s rude.”

Sean looked up. “Huh?”

“I said it’s rude to stare. Didn’t your mum ever tell you that?” 

“Let him be,” their father’s voice chimed from the kitchen. “He’s just a kid.”

Ordinarily, this would have been enough to send Julian back to complacency, biting his tongue as he weighed the consequences of speaking back to the man. But hell hath no fury like a teenager scorned, if by scorned, you mean thrown into the exact conflict that had moments ago been simmering in their mind. 

Crossing his arms, tilting his head over the back of the sofa, Julian groaned, “He’s your kid, right? So why don’t you teach him not to stare, for Christ’s sake?”

“Come on.”

“I’m just askin’ you a question. He’s gonna turn out to be a serial killer or something, if you fuck him up enough.”

Whatever had previously sat on the stove was now completely unattended as their father stepped into the living room, flush with anger. “Jesus, Julian, don’t curse in front of him!”

“I’m sure he’s heard far worse,” the young man grumbled. 

“You know something,” his father hissed. “If you don’t wanna be here, you can call your mum and tell her you’re coming home. I’m sick of this.”

Julian had learned over the years (or at least had tried) not to take the man’s chiding personally, that he was probably too doped up or out of his mind to mean it, or that he simply didn’t care enough about Julian to return the gesture with sorrow. But there was something in the tone of his voice, something in his choice of words, that sent the young man into a tizzy.

His father was sick of him. 

Well, two could play that game. 

“God,” he mumbled, standing up. “See if I care. Let’s just get it over with; it’ll save us all some time.”

“You’re—”

“Don’t even bother,” Julian raged, sure that whatever he would hear next would crush him. “I’m done.”

And before his father could find the words, the young man rushed to the guest bedroom and slammed the door shut. Pressing his back up against it, his palms sinking down the wood, Julian fell slowly but surely onto the floor, his knees tucked to his chest, numb from the inside out. 

He was sixteen years old, and life was finally coming into focus. 

As it turned out, it was the furthest thing from a box of roses. It was a bundle of them with all of the bulbs decapitated, leaving only the stems and thorns, a white elephant that you could never throw away or toss off to someone else. 

Next summer, he swore to himself, he would stay in Wales. He would find work as a waiter or at a record shop, then tell his father he was too busy to visit. 

One way or another, he would never see the man again.

Chapter Text

It started with a screech, a creak like a ship being ripped in two by the sea. The house took one final breath in, as if to prepare itself for what was coming, and then, barely a meter from Julian’s bedroom, the chimney collapsed. 

His eyes snapped open, his ears ringing as the sound quelled, a squealing flame without any fuel left to sustain it. 

The room seemed darker than usual, shadows outlining the wardrobe and the doorframe 

like cross-hatched ink sketches. His vision still blurred with sleep, Julian could make out the pile of clothes in the corner, his school uniform kicked unceremoniously out of view. 

He squinted and turned to the clock. 

It was five in the morning, it told him, and the sun had yet to rise. 

Ordinarily, Julian would have gone back to bed, safe in the knowledge that he could sleep in for another hour and a half, deciding the broken chimney was a matter for the morning. After all, whether Schrӧdinger’s chimney was dead or alive, he was exhausted, and for a brief moment, he considered setting his head back down. 

But something stopped him. 

He would never be able to put a name to it, but as the last echoes of the creaking sound bounced through his brain, Julian was overcome with a feeling that something was deeply wrong, that he had fallen asleep in one world and woken up in another. 

So, with no idea where he was going, he stepped out of bed. 

His first instinct was to find his mother, to ask her if she had heard the noise and whether she was alright, but he quickly abandoned the idea. She had left to visit a friend in London, and wouldn’t be back for at least another day.

That meant he was home alone with his stepfather, who for better or worse, might not have been awake. 

The stairs squeaked as he trod downstairs, focusing his gaze on the bricks spilled in the fireplace, struggling to inspect the damage without his glasses.

All of the curtains were closed, and through the darkness, Julian’s eyes followed a sudden puff of smoke, a trail leading from the sofa, wafting into the air. 

Looking closer, he realized he was staring at a person with a cigarette in his mouth, and nearly screamed.

“Jesus H. Christ, John!” he shouted, running his hands through his hair as his stepfather looked up. “You scared me!”

The old man mumbled what must have been an apology, though his words were messy and pierced with the uncertainty of fear. 

“What’s going on,” Julian demanded, his eyes suddenly wide, his stomach turning. “What’s with the chimney? Why are all the curtains closed?”

His stepfather thought about his answer carefully, and then, resigned, replied, “They… should stay closed. Believe me.”

“Why.”

“Your mum’s on her way home… something happened. But—”

If he was not so determined to find an answer, Julian might just have vomited. “Oh God, what is it?”

“Look, your mum thinks it’d be better if we talked in the morning… that… that would be best, you know.”

“Well, here I am,” the young man fumed. “And the fucking chimney just collapsed, and I know that ‘something bad’ is going on, but not what that ‘something’ is, so I’m not exactly going to fall asleep again, am I?”

“Julian…”

But he was sick to death of dawdling. “My God, you’re useless!”

Against his better conscience, Julian ran across the room to the front window. 

The curtains were lace, gaudy things his mother had inherited from some aunt, crunchy from what was easily a century’s worth of abuse. His fingers stopped for a moment as he reached for the partition, and for half a second, he could have sworn the fabric shocked him. 

Fear swelled in his heart, a premonition, an echo, a moment of déjà vu , and though he wanted to rip the curtain away and listen to it screech like iron, instead he simply peeked out from behind it. 

The front garden had been turned into what could only be described as a carnival, a show of flashing lights and camera shutters, a paparazzi’s wet dream. But as Julian’s eyes met the crowd’s, everyone seemed to look away, and though the cameras flashed and clicked, there was a distinctive sense of shame in the act, like for once in their lives, the photographers wondered whether they should just leave him alone. 

Julian’s heart sank, and just as quickly as he had opened the curtain, he closed it. 

If the press was outside, it wasn’t for him. It wasn’t for the chimney, and it wasn’t even for his mother. 

And the sheer size of the crowd—

Chills ran down the young man’s body, his feet frozen in place, staring at that god-awful lace and wishing the entire house had collapsed instead. 

He felt every emotion all at once, a psychotic combination of anger, sadness, boredom, and fear. Still, no matter how much he kicked or screamed, Julian could not get off of the carnival ride. He couldn’t toss the rose stems into the trash. 

So he just swallowed it, as bitter as it was.

“Dad’s dead,” he whispered.

It wasn’t so much a question as it was a statement, a guess that had no choice but to be true, if only to complete the horror show that was Julian’s life. 

His stepfather didn’t answer him. 

Then again, he didn’t need to.