Chapter Text
The house always felt quieter when Kael was gone.
Not peaceful — never that. Just... empty, like the quiet had soaked into the floorboards, pressing against the walls until even the hum of the heater sounded hollow. I could still hear my parents talking down the hall, their voices threading through the thin drywall, but it didn’t make the house feel any less deserted.
I turned my hearing aid up another notch, catching the familiar crackle as it strained to catch every word. I needed to hear them — even when their conversations only made the silence worse.
“I don't know what we're going to do about him,” my father said. I pictured him scrubbing a hand over his face, glasses dangling from his other hand, like he always did when he thought he was alone.
“He's... he's just like that boy down the street,” my mother replied, voice worn thin, a whisper almost lost to the static buzz in my ear. “Nineteen, still living at home, no college, no plans. Just... drifting.”
They never said Kael’s name. Maybe they thought if they didn’t speak it, they wouldn’t have to face what was happening — the slammed back doors at midnight, the way Kael would stagger home hours later, clothes torn, arms scratched raw like he'd fought his way through a forest of thorns. They pretended he wasn’t the one muttering strange words under his breath, words that didn’t belong in any language I knew but still made my skin crawl.
I hated pretending.
I hated it when I heard his boots crunch through the woods, the sound swallowed by the dark. I hated it when I stayed up for hours, watching the clock, hoping he'd come back — and realizing, more and more, that I didn’t know how to help him if he didn't. I hated it most when I sat at the dinner table, staring at the empty chair across from me, feeling it turn from furniture into a question I couldn’t answer.
There was a time — I knew there was — when Kael was my brother, my hero.
When he used to lift me onto his shoulders to pick the first apples of the season. When he’d sing off-key while we biked down the old dirt road, racing the sunset.
I tried to remember those moments, tried to believe they were real, but they slipped further away every day, like dreams I couldn't quite wake up from.
*****
Dinner had been the same as always — a careful, brittle quiet, like even breathing too loud might shatter the whole illusion of peace.
Dad asked me how my day was. I said it was fine.
There wasn’t much else to say. It was summer, the dead space between junior and senior year, and I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with plans. No friends blowing up my phone. No invitations.
At school, I was the weirdo. The odd one out.
The half-deaf, openly gay kid everyone knew hanging around was basically a form of social suicide.
Honestly, though? It didn’t bother me the way people thought it should. I saw their pitying looks across the cafeteria — like I was some sad, broken thing — but it didn’t sink into my bones the way loneliness sometimes does.
I could live without people who only knew how to look at me sideways.
Mom and Dad never really understood that. They weren’t bad parents, not in the ways that counted — but they didn’t feel like home either. They felt like... people I lived with. People who wanted so badly for me to be normal that they forgot to see me at all.
Dinner might’ve stayed silent after that if Mom hadn’t made the mistake of asking Kael about college.
You’d think parents in a town like ours would be thrilled their kids weren’t racking up debt they couldn’t pay. But no — Mom was obsessed with the idea of us both getting a “proper” education, even if the world was burning down around her.
Kael snapped back — said he was figuring it out, that he just needed time.
Mom took it like he’d slapped her. She fired back about how she was putting a roof over his head and clothes on his back and how if he didn’t pull his life together soon, he’d be doing it alone, on the street.
Cue another shouting match.
I didn’t even flinch anymore.
I just headed for my room, tugged my hearing aid out (finally, blessed silence, or partial silence, but some is better than none), and buried myself under my weighted blanket. Curled up with my favorite frog plushie and a half-finished fantasy novel, I let the world end without me for a little while.
*****
It was peaceful in the solitude of my room — a kind of fragile peace I didn’t dare disturb. Here, I didn’t have to be anything. Not the good kid, not the weird one, not even the version of myself I tried so hard to be. I could just... exist.
And honestly, it was a relief.
Around the handful of friends and half-decent acquaintances I had, I was always the upbeat one — the optimist. The guy who laughed easily, who brushed off weird stares and pity glances like they didn’t sting. It wasn’t a lie. That version of me was real, and I liked him. I liked being the one who refused to let the world break him.
But I couldn’t be that person here. Not at home.
Here, I was the broken second son. The one who didn’t speak much — or at all, for the first six years of his life, thanks to EVA.
The one who needed a hearing aid just to stay tethered to conversations, to avoid the endless, humiliating “What? Sorry, what did you say?”
The one whose very existence had made Mom’s side of the family turn their backs — because what good was a “Christian” grandbaby who came out imperfect?
I hated this side of me. The silent, small version of myself that shrank to fit the disappointment everyone pretended they weren’t choking on.
But I understood why he had to exist. It was survival. It was armor. And sometimes armor isn't about winning — it's about lasting long enough to see if the world changes.
That night, curled beneath my weighted blanket, I let my mind wander — like it always did — to Kael.
Where did he go when he disappeared into the woods? Was it an escape, the way track was for me? Did he run through the trees and imagine he was some brave adventurer, saving an imaginary brother — a better brother — because the real one wasn’t worth the effort?
Or maybe he found a different brother out there in the dark, one he could pretend he liked. One who didn’t ruin everything just by existing.
I wouldn’t blame him if he did.
My birth had wrecked things for Kael, hadn't it? That was the only explanation I could ever come up with for the coldness in his eyes when he looked at me — or worse, the way he didn’t look at me at all.
Sure, most siblings fought. Argued. Slammed doors and stole hoodies, and made up five minutes later.
I would’ve taken any of that. Anything would’ve been better than the sheer, aching silence that stretched between us — proof that in Kael’s world, I was already a ghost.
*****
Finally, the fighting stopped, somewhere close to 10:30 PM.
Earlier than usual, if you could believe it. Most nights, the screaming matches dragged on until midnight, sometimes even later. I could still remember one night — I must have been thirteen, Kael fifteen — when they kept at it until nearly 1 AM.
That one had been impressive, in a horrifying sort of way. They'd gone to war over someone Kael had been seeing — someone nonbinary — and Mom, still clutching her old conservative beliefs like a security blanket she couldn’t quite let go of, hadn’t handled it well.
She was trying now, trying harder than most parents in this town ever would, and I gave her credit for that. But the damage was already there, sunk into the bones of our family, thick and heavy and impossible to scrub out.
I knew this fight was officially over when Kael’s door slammed shut hard enough to make the wall shake. Then came the muffled thuds — drawers yanked open, the sharp zip of a backpack being stuffed too full, too fast.
I flinched when the door burst open again, the doorknob cracking against the drywall with a sound like a gunshot. Heavy boots stomped down the hall. A second later, the front door groaned open, then slammed shut, rattling in its frame.
He left again tonight. Eleven o’clock. Earlier than usual.
I sat frozen in my bed, listening to the silence he'd left behind. But this time — this time, I wasn’t going to let it win. The house could be as hollow and trembling as it wanted; I was staying awake.
I was going to watch. Maybe if I watched, I could understand. Maybe if I stayed awake, he’d come back.
Hours slid by, heavy and slow. The clock blinked past midnight. Then one. Then two.
I sat by my window, the glass cold against my forehead, staring into the yawning dark woods that bordered our backyard. It was stupid, maybe, but I couldn’t shake the feeling gnawing at the back of my mind — the heavy, sinking certainty that tonight wasn’t like the others.
That tonight would be the last night Kael would walk out that door. That this time, he wasn’t going to come back.
And somehow, deep in my chest, I already knew: if Kael disappeared into the woods this time, he wasn’t just leaving.
He was gone.