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Grian tucked his head up against the cold car door, letting it quell the burning sensation he was experiencing deep inside his brain. He didn’t have a fever, confirmed by Scar’s fretting temperature checks, so he could only assume that his brain was cooking itself due to being overworked. He couldn’t help it. Ever since Scar had mentioned that they’d been invited to his family’s get-together his brain had been working overtime with the thoughts of everything that could go wrong.
He'd met Scar’s family before, he had gotten through the awkward ‘meet the parents’ dinner over a year ago now, but this was different. This was the extended family, the ones who didn’t need to pretend to like him for Scar’s sake. Worst still, if they didn’t like him and they made it known, Scar might take their advice and throw him to the side. Scar loved his family, and while he said he loved Grian, the blond knew he could never outweigh that.
Grian opened his eyes in time to see Scar’s childhood street name whirl past, and he sat up to attention. He pulled the mirror down and made sure his hair hadn’t been messed up from where he had been pressed against the window before readying himself mentally. For assistance, he looked over at Scar at the wheel, who smiled back as he put the handbrake on. His boyfriend reached over and brushed his hair lightly to one side. Grian knew it looked fine, it was just something Scar did, but that didn’t stop him from overanalysing the gesture.
They got out of the car and made the short journey up to the front door, hand in hand. Grian expected his boyfriend to knock, but Scar just opened the door and gestured for him to go inside, “Everyone will be in the back garden by now, Mom said to just come in.”
Grian nodded and stepped past his boyfriend, taking in the house for what felt like the first time. It felt like this every time he came as he was startled by how picture-perfect but lived-in a house could look. It reminded him of a Disney Channel original movie or one of those after pictures on a home renovation show. Yet life was breathed into every corner.
Scar excused himself to go to the bathroom, leaving Grian idle in the hallway, unsure if he should go into the garden and join Scar’s family alone or not. His mind wandered away from the question as he took in every piece of evidence of his boyfriend’s childhood. There were scuff marks on the bottom of every door frame where Scar’s many cats growing up had clawed, mixed in with the uncountable times Scar or his younger brother Bdubs had kicked them as an opening mechanism. Around the front door, there were wheel scuffs from when Scar had been in a wheelchair as a child, having grown into a walking cane by the time Grian had met him. Most of the scuffs were covered by a welcome mat with the phrase “Always Welcome” written in the fanciest font you could imagine.
Grian wandered along the hall, guided by a scattered array of pictures hung up along the opposite wall. They made a map of Scar’s childhood, something Grian knew the story of, but it was different to see it visually in front of him. One of the photos Grian recognised. Cleo, Scar’s Mum, had shown it to him much to Scar’s horror. He was a young teenager with the most prominent pair of braces affixed to his face, a pair of thick-rimmed glasses sitting just above them. He looked every part like the nerd Grian knew he was deep down, even now.
The pictures led him into the dining room where Grian had first had dinner with Scar’s parents, a set of height markers on the door frame, and Grian sat down on the chair where Scar’s Dad, Etho, had sat.
As he wondered how far Scar had to go to get to the bathroom, Grian heard the front door open. A couple of kids ran into the room and sat down at the table, giggling between themselves with a hushed scheming tone. They paid no attention to Grian, instead picking up phantom bowls from the table and filling their plates high with food Grian swore was not there a moment ago.
He got a good look at one of the boys’ faces and saw the same wild eyes of his boyfriend staring back at him. Grian was hit with the realisation that he was seeing things again, an unfortunately common occurrence. Despite knowing the immateriality of the two boys, Grian continued to watch as Scar and the other boy, who Grian could only assume was Bdubs, tucked into their meal. It made him happy, to see his boyfriend so young and smiley. It made perfect sense when he looked at the man he was today. There was something palpable about the fact that Scar had been raised being fed an abundance of love and joy. From the day they met, Grian knew that Scar had grown up eating at the table with his parents, a concept which was alien to Grian at the time.
“G?” Grian was pulled from the visions when adult Scar came in at last. Grian could see from his eyes that his boyfriend knew he was seeing something that wasn’t there and had possibly been standing in the doorway for a while now, though Grian didn’t know, “Do you wanna come meet everyone?”
Scar knew he didn’t, but Grian accepted anyway, standing and making sure the chair was left exactly as he had found it. His boyfriend led him through to the back of the house where an open set of glass doors led out into a large but cosy garden. There were flower beds with small toys in them, a sign of the flurry of children racing around. Some were on the small swing set in the corner, begging to be pushed higher and higher, though shrieking if they ever got more than a few feet in the air.
Cleo came over and hugged her son before turning to extend the same affection to Grian. When she pulled back, Cleo tucked Grian’s hair to the side in the same manner Scar had done before insisting the pair eat before they could do anything else. She didn’t give them a moment to think, instead dragging them over to the nicely arranged table with a mountain of food on it. She picked up two paper plates and piled them high before handing them over to the couple.
Cleo stood with them for a while, and Grian couldn’t help but feel like he was under the surveillance of a watch tower, ensuring that he was eating. She talked to Scar about their drive here, about their week, about how they should come over more often. She was only pulled away when a young girl tripped and fell hard on her knee, scraping just the smallest wound into her leg. Her parents immediately ran over and comforted the little girl, soothing her while Cleo went inside for some wipes and a plaster.
Scar too was carried away when his brother showed up. Bdubs said hello to Grian before jabbing his brother in the side with a shout of “Tag, you’re it!” before he raced off into the garden, weaving in and out of the small crowd with his older brother not too far behind. Grian smiled, holding both plates now as Scar had unceremoniously asked him to take it to not slow down his hunt for his brother. Grian watched as the family good-heartedly shook their heads watching the two grown men chase each other around the garden, undistinguishable from the small children doing the same.
Grian’s eyes eventually fell on Scar’s Dad setting up another table to put the drinks on. He places both plates down before going over to help, not too subtly getting himself away from the crowd that had begun to form around the middle of the garden.
“Need any help?” Grian asked, startling Etho out of his intense concentration. He was a quiet man, from what Grian had seen, and a gentle soul, as Cleo had described. He smiled when he realised Grian was standing near and gave him the job of unboxing the wine. Grian looked in the box to see five bottles of red wine, and he carefully placed them on the table one by one near the glasses Etho was setting out.
When he got to the last bottle, Grian didn’t notice how it was slightly wet, possibly having had something spilt on it throughout the day, and as he turned to place it on the table, the dark green bottle slipped and shattered on the ground. Grian froze, bewildered, and he could feel eyes on him as he dropped to the floor in a useless attempt to stop the red liquid from bleeding into the perfectly clean paving stone any further. He panicked and could hear himself breathing from the inside, unable to hear much else. He jumped at the sudden hand on his shoulder, looking up to see Etho with a comforting smile, insisting that it was okay.
“It’s just a cheap bottle of wine, we have plenty.” He assured the shaking man, pulling him to stand up. Grian saw Cleo come over as well, having returned from her fetch quest, and she guided him over to another table to sit down. She placed the plate he had abandoned in front of him, suspiciously refilled, as well as a glass of water. She brushed his hair from where it had fallen into his eyes and said something about fetching Scar before leaving Grian’s field of vision.
Alone, Grian could almost feel his hallucinations sinking into him again as everyone around him faded away. He was still in the garden, sat at the table, food in front of him, but everything else was off. The swing set morphed into a sofa with a blaring TV screen in front of it. He could see a shadowy figure sitting there, unmoving but menacing nonetheless. He felt a tug on his arm and looked down to see his little sister begging to be picked up, but as he did so he felt another small figure already curled up in his lap. His baby brother was shaking at the loud noises all the while Grian desperately tried to feed him with the spoon he didn’t notice he was holding.
Grian could distinctly hear the laughter of children somewhere far off, but in this world he has surrounded himself in, it sounded more like the crying he was used to. The table in front of him looked less full than it had been before, the plate he knew was full of homemade rolls and fruit now only had a microwaved slab of some kind of health violation. He bounced Jimmy up and down whilst Pearl continued to pull on his arm. He didn’t know where Joel was, probably somewhere getting into trouble, and the sense of not knowing was somehow worse than the constant reminders of his siblings that were there, hungry and desperate for love he wasn’t meant to be providing them.
The crying and the buzzing of the TV static in his brain were almost too much when Scar came over and knelt beside him, replacing Pearl and letting the visions of his past disappear once more.
“Hey G,” Scar said, smiling in that sad way he does when he’s trying to cheer Grian up, where his eyes all but close and his mouth becomes a long line. He reminded Grian of a cat lying in the sun, “Do you want to eat any more of that?”
Scar tilted his head towards the plate of food left untouched on the table, and despite his boyfriend managing to calm most of the storm in his brain, the plate remained that awful grey mess he remembered feeding Jimmy every day for a week once. He shook his head and looked back at Scar’s face, somehow sadder and smiling even harder than before, “It’s… I can’t.”
“That’s okay.” Scar stood up, using his stick for balance, his knees creaking after using the little stability he could muster to chase after his brother. He picked the plate up, cheekily placing a small, cold pork pie in his mouth before taking it away.
When he returned, Grian couldn’t stand the understanding look in his eyes. The way Cleo’s food had transformed back to being perfectly nice and edible as soon as it had touched his hands, but when he held Grian’s cold hand between them, it didn’t have the same effect. Grian looked beyond his boyfriend and saw the red stain of the wine on the floor, with Etho hunched over it, smiling as he cleaned it up.
For a short moment when Grian thought he might throw up, the wine looked like blood. It was all over Etho’s hands, and on the knees of his trousers where he knelt by it. It bled up until it was encasing him, encasing the garden in blood. Grian knew why his brain was doing this, it was showing him how he was going to corrupt this beautiful perfect family with his fucked-up life.
Grian stumbled his way back into the house, leaving Scar behind him. He sat on the floor of the random hallway he had wandered into alone, back up against the wall and his head placed harshly in his hands. He breathed as well as he could. His boyfriend stayed in place, giving Grian time to breathe which almost made things worse. Scar was so sweet and had been raised so well that he couldn’t even justify Grian’s thoughts. Couldn’t let him be a problem or a burden for even a second. Grian almost wanted Scar to shout at him, ask him what the hell he was doing and ask him to just act normal for once. Everyone else was, so why couldn’t he?
A small terrifying bit of hope surged into Grian’s brain when Scar appeared, a glass of wine in his hand that Grian wished he would break over his head. He didn’t, unsurprisingly, instead sitting down next to his boyfriend, far enough away that Grian could escape if he wanted to. Grian was having none of it, instantly scooting over until they were side by side.
They sat in silence for a moment, Scar probably trying to think of something profound to say, something about how it would all get better. Maybe, Grian thought in that messed up way again, he would tell him that he didn’t love him anymore because he was so screwed up in the head, and ask him to leave and never come back again please and thank you.
That didn’t happen either, weirdly enough.
“My family love you, ya know?” Scar said, lightly bumping shoulders with Grian, “I’ve never told them why you stare at nothing sometimes, or why I didn’t want balloons at the party, and I never will unless you want me to.”
Grian stayed silent.
“But they understand you didn’t have the best time growing up, and they think they can somehow change that by showing you the love you deserved back then, tenfold.” Scar admitted, “Which isn’t how that works, and I’ll ask them to stop if you want me to.”
Grian stayed silent.
“But they do love you so much. Not in spite of everything you’ve been through either,” Scar insisted, “It’s in the way you smile and it’s all gummy and your nose scrunches up. Or how when Gem took a tumble out there you immediately reached out to help her. Or how you asked my Dad if he wanted help even though you’ve got so much going on up there.”
Grian looked up at his boyfriend through stagnant tears on his lashes, “Really?”
“Sometimes I think my parents love you more than I do.” Scar bluntly joked, eyes wide and stunned looking, if only to get Grian to laugh.
“Oh yeah?” Grian asked.
“However that, I’m afraid, is impossible.” Scar said, worming his arms around his boyfriend, “And I’ll just have to keep reminding you of that until you believe it.” Scar leaned his head on top of Grian’s, nuzzling into his hair uncaring if it got messed up.
“That might take a while.” Grian choked out wetly.
“I know.”