Work Text:
Gideon does not remember his parents. Nor does he remember how awful it was to go from two parents to none with the brevity of a knock at the door and a phone call. He does not remember the awkward adjustment period of Aunt Loretta moving back into the brownstone to care for him and his brothers. He does not remember sleepless nights spent crying over old family photo albums, or the three months where Simon refused to eat much of anything besides rocky road ice cream, nor does he remember that it was his Father’s favorite. He doesn't remember Aunt Lore staying up until the wee hours on the phone with her friend Duchy, trying to stay sane. He does not remember when Malcolm was grounded at least twice a week for sneaking out.
He was two years old when his parents died in a car crash. They died 6 weeks before his 3rd birthday. The brakes in their car had failed, and they were killed instantly upon impact with an overpass pile. Less than a week later, on a particularly balmy day in late August, they were buried in a shared grave. He does not remember their funeral, although he knows that somewhere in the deep depths of the boxes of the attic, is a funeral program pamphlet from that very day.
Their headstone, not yet finished by the date of their burial, but a memorial he has seen so many times since, is something he can picture in full in his mind. Its most memorable feature is a sundial motto his mother had loved, which she found in the realms of an old book his father bought for her at a run-down secondhand shop not long after they began dating. The story of its origin is a tale that's retold each year when they revisit the grave on the anniversary of their deaths. It’s something soft and tangible that his mind holds onto far too often, the image of a man and a woman who he looks so much like, and a battered old book now lost to time held in his father’s hands, his mother reading its pages aloud - although he has little reference to the cadence of her voice but old tapes from their wedding and a few family videos. The motto went thusly:
“It’s later than you think.”
He doesn't remember when just as everything fell back into place, just as calm returned, they got another call.
Dr. and Mrs. Andrevski, his parent's friends and colleagues, had passed away two days before, in a robbery gone wrong. Dr Andrevski died at the scene, but Mrs. Andrevski survived for several hours in the hospital before succumbing to her injuries. They had no family left but a little girl who'd just turned 2. Their will stated clearly that in the event of both of them passing away, their daughter was to be left in the custody of the Remzi family.
Gideon does not remember a time before he had a sister, just like he doesn’t remember Miss Duchy moving in shortly after Ronny’s arrival, nor Aunt Lore nearly breaking down under the weight of all these grieving children. He does, however, in all the important moments he was too small to know, remember when Ronny was officially adopted.
Ronny was 7 when she was adopted, he had been 8. He had held her hand at the courthouse, while paperwork was shown to the presiding judge, who had seemed thrilled at this occurrence. There’s a picture on Aunt Lore’s desk in her study of that very moment, Miss Duchy had taken it. He and Malcolm and Simon in their nicest suits, Ronny in this frilly pale purple dress, Aunt Lore, dressed in what Gideon always thought of as her theatre-going dress, which was black and plain and made her look like an undercover movie starlet, her hands resting on his and Ronny shoulders, her smile like diamonds.
Malcolm & Simon are Irish twins, a year and a half apart. When Veronica was brought into the family, he received his own Irish twin. They’re just barely over a year apart. It felt even, fair - like it matched. 1.6.1. That’s what he pictured in his mind; 1.6.1. The gulf of years between him and his brothers felt like a lifetime and by the time he was old enough to appreciate having them, they were already grown up enough that they didn’t want to spend all their time playing with their younger siblings. But having Ronny made it better because there was nothing Ronny wanted to do other than play with him.
She put up with every movie musical he played loud on the game room TV. Even putting up with his untrained voice singing enthusiastically along, but only if he paid her back by playing Knights of the Round Table with her. She loved playing dress up with him and digging through the fancy lacquered boxes of old jewelry in the storage room in the attic. But her favorite was always when Gideon read to her.
Gideon had never been much of a talker, nor did he actually much enjoy the act of speaking, a fact that nobody in the Remzi household cared about. Instead choosing the easier route of learning to understand the odd bits of noise he made in lieu of such and however they tied to language. In all honesty, by the report of Aunt Lore, he didn’t speak until he was nearly 5, and it was in full sentences. But he would talk for Ronny. This was a courtesy he would end up extending to Hadley, then his family, and finally, after a few more years, he would speak to anyone, however disjointedly, when the situation made it the only option. That’s why he didn’t end up at Fenton Academy until he was 7, starting as a 1st grader just as Ronny began kindergarten. After that, he ended up skipping from 2nd to 4th, then from 5th to 7th. It was… oddly isolating, but the school directed that it would be best for him, so Aunt Lore signed off on it.
Although his therapist said that engaging more with people his age would be good for him, he didn't entirely want to. He already had Ronny & Hadley, which felt like more than enough. Besides, if he was perfectly honest, he preferred his odd semi-mutism, and no one who actually mattered even cared. Hadley, who wasn’t family and therefore had no reason to be kind to him, cared least of all about how strange he acted.
He met Hadley when he was 4 and a half, meeting her for the first time was one of his earliest memories. She’s a year and a half older than him, which means everything and nothing at all. Whichever reins between those two ideals flip-flops from moment to moment. But, from that day on, everything in his life involved Hadley. He’s hard-pressed to think of something he cherishes that Hadley hasn’t touched and he comes back entirely, completely, empty-handed.
She’s his best friend, and in all the ways that his family is ever so odd, he supposes that Hadley too, is his sister.