Chapter Text
You have a long journey ahead of you, little brother.
But I’ll be watching over you the whole way, okay?
You can do this. After all, you’re done with the hard parts. It's all uphill from here.
I love you, Sunny.
The first thing Sunny notices when he wakes up is the small stream of sunlight cascading down from the thin slits between the blinds of his window. It reflects a rainbow onto the empty whiteness of the walls, giving them a small spot of colour, like a splash of paint on an otherwise empty canvas.
This made him smile.
The second thing Sunny notices is his lack of a left eye. He holds up a hand to his face, rotating his bandaged palm and notices how his vision warps and shifts in ways it didn’t before. Gingerly, he reaches up, feeling the cotton bandages wrapped around his head. A shooting pain rushes through his skull when he touches the patch, making him wince.
Right, Basil.
Basil.
The tiles are cold on his bare feet, his hospital gown not aiding in conserving any sort of warmth, despite the summer heat. The hospital smells cold and unfeeling. Metallic and impersonal. He walks down the hall aimlessly, just trusting he'll find the room. He sees his friends, a blur of pastels, inviting, familiar. On the opposite side, a shadow envelopes the wall, it's eyes boring into Sunny's. It tilts its head. Beckoning him. His friends smile and call out. Not waiting for an answer, they skip happily down the corridor. The stranger turns and walks in the other direction.
Stranger,
that silent, hollow, reflection of the friend he once knew. The friend who currently lies in a room somewhere down this hallway.
Lies, whispers a voice from the depths of Sunny's head. That's all he does, doesn't he? He lies, and he simpers, and preens, and he acts innocent, all for you. All to ensure you a place of comfort, that place where you can hide from all the things you don't want to think about. And you sit back and let him do it.
Sunny brushes this thought away as he follows the shadowy figure down the hall. Yeah, he thinks, and that's why I’m here. It ends now.
Basil's hospital room is dead silent, and yet still a cacophony of noise. The thrum of medical equipment, the consistent rhythm of Aubrey's pacing, along with the drumming of Kel's nails on the sides of the plastic chair. A chorus of anxiety.
Suddenly, the door slams open, shattering the rhythm like a symbol crash in the middle of a symphony.
‘Sunny! You really shouldn't be walking in this condition,’ Hero pauses, ‘...Are you alright?’
‘I…’ Sunny shakes his head. ‘I have something to tell you.’
A silent shock radiates through the room. Sunny was always quiet, saving his words for only the things that really mattered, like slandering Kel's opinion on the latest Captain Spaceboy comic, but after Mari’s death he stopped speaking altogether. His voice was softer than he meant it to be, and croaky due to years left unused. And, to Sunny's surprise, significantly deeper than when he last used it.
‘You can tell us when you're better. C'mon I'll take you back to your room.” Kel says, almost convincingly seeming to shake off the surprise, “Hey, I'll even get you something from the vending machine? How's about it, Sunny?’ The younger boy shrugs him off.
‘No,’ he mumbles, ‘I need to tell you this now.’
‘Sunny – ’
‘Guys, Let him say it,’ Aubrey stares deep into Sunny's eyes, seemingly searching for some hidden answer, a reason why he's speaking for the first time since it happened, ‘I think it's important.’
‘Mari… She didn't… She didn't kill herself.’ All of the air is sucked out of the room. ‘We had an argument and I-’
Hero lets out a sudden deep sigh, like letting go of a breath he'd been holding since Sunny entered the room.
‘Sunny. Listen to me,’ He takes him by the shoulders, almost shaking the boy. ‘It’s not your fault. You can't blame yourself like this.’
‘No!’ There was a forcefulness to Sunny's words that almost knocks Hero off his feet. Sunny gently pushes him back again.
‘I wasn't playing it right. The song. We- We were practicing for the recital,’ Sunny's hands shake as if holding the bow once more.
They had been practising for months. So long that the mere sound of a piano key put Sunny on edge. Every day while his friends were out in the treehouse or playing video games, he was stuck in this tiny, tinny little room being yelled at. It seemed like every single day he was practicing for or playing or thinking about the duet, the thought of everyone, his friends' and his family’s eyes on him as he performed sickened him. He'd have nightmares of standing up there and being torn off the stage by a vengeful audience after playing the wrong note, being torn limb from limb after being off time. But the worst part was always Mari. The disappointment in her eyes when he got something wrong, or worse, the anger when he couldn't fix it.
‘It was that night and I couldn't-’
The bow sawed into the strings like a butcher's knife into flesh, a piercing squealing noise that raised goosebumps on the back of Sunny's neck.
‘Sunny, that's a C sharp again.’ Mari sighs, unclenching her jaw. ‘Let's just start over, Ok?’ He nods, looking down at the ground.
Again. The wrong note.
‘Sunny!’ She slams her hands down on the keys. A discordant mix of sounds, clashing together to form one horrific clang. Somehow this sound is worse than his violin playing. ‘That's the fifth time! I'm starting to think you’re just doing this to piss me off.’
Sunny shakes his head, still not looking at her.
‘I can't do it.’
‘You can't? Or you won't?’
‘I wouldn't play the right note.’
Mari picks up the sheet music, waving it around wildly.
‘Look! Look at what the book says! That's a C. Not an A… Not an F sharp. A C. Are you playing a C, Sunny?’
‘...No.’
‘What? I can't hear you,’ Her voice raises to a yell, ‘Over all of these sharp notes you're playing!’
‘No!’ This is the last straw for Sunny. He slaps the sheet music out of her hands and runs out of the room, the hardwood door slamming behind him with a crash. The wood of the violin is cold and callous under his hands, he wishes he was strong enough to crush it then and there. Atop of the stairs he shakes with anger. It's really the violin's fault after all, that he's wasted all this time. It's this stupid violin's fault that his sister hates him.
He flings the violin, far and hard down the staircase. The pristine wooden stairs, polished specially for the recital, are tarnished. Covered with flecks of wooden splinters and shrapnel.
‘I ran away. Threw my violin down the stairs.’
‘What did you do!?’ Mari stands behind him, horrified. ‘What on earth – Do you know how much that cost? How much time our friends spent saving for that? How much time I spent working my butt off for that stupid chunk of wood?’
‘I –’
‘You what? You don't care? I can tell! I can tell in the way you have never showed a single cent of gratitude for everything we do for you. Do you think it's easy to have a brother who is so stupid he can't even play the song he's been practising for 6 months!?’
Mari stares at him with a look of complete and utter disgust.
‘She was angry… obviously.’
Mari's mouth continues to move, but Sunny doesn’t hear any of it. Be it from the tears in his eyes or the lack of sleep from stressing about the recital , his surroundings seem to blur into each other. Everything is loud and nothing seems real.
‘In that moment the only thing that mattered to me was leaving, or.. getting out somehow, but she- she stepped in front of me.’
‘Don’t run away from me, Sunny!’ He just needs to get out. He tries to push past her,
‘And I pushed her.’
The look of disgust turns to horror as she realises she's lost her balance. Her knees begin to buckle with a sickening crunch.
‘And her bad knee meant. Well. She fell.’
All Sunny can hear as she tumbles is that same sound of all the piano keys clanging at once.
Kel chuckled humorlessly, shaking his head.
‘So, you were arguing and she had an accident, Sunny, that doesn't make.. what she did your fault, I don't understand-’
‘She wasn't breathing, Kel.’
Her always perfect, always pristine black hair hung in knots over her face, tangled, entertwined with the strings of the violin. Her eyes, always so full of life, now seemed glassy and false.
‘I killed her.’
‘Sunny, this isn't funny. She hung herself. We saw her dead fucking body.’ Aubrey shakes with emotion.
‘ Basil saw it all.’
He stood there like a deer in the headlights, the morning light around him shining like a halo.
‘We didn't know what to do.’
Sunny stares at him, pleading with the angel.
‘All we knew was that no one could find out what I did.’
Their eyes meet, and he nods.
‘We were so scared.’
‘Don’t worry… Everything is going to be okay…’ Basil said these words like a prayer, an effort to convince himself more than Sunny.
‘Basil… He didn't know what he was doing. I- I don’t think he was really there .’
‘Promise me…’
He ties the knot with practiced ease, his eyes almost as glassy as the girl's.
‘I can't listen to this anymore.’ Hero mumbles, a hand over his brow.
‘No matter what happens…’ A sweet smile is stuck to his face, staring off into the distance, into some other place.
‘He was desperate. To… to save me. Hanging her…’ He forces the words out through gritted teeth. Accepting what happened is the only way to move on. ‘Was the only thing we knew to do.’
‘Promise me that we'll always be there for each other…’ Sunny and Basil clung to each other as their friends began to appear around them.
“I think I'm gonna be sick.” Kel grips the wall as if he'd been hit with a sudden wave of nausea. He probably was. Confronting what happened all at once like that shocked Sunny just as much. He feels every emotion he felt that day, and looking at Aubrey, Kel, and Hero's shocked and disgusted faces, he sees Mari's in all of them.
“C'mon Kel, I… uh, I need fresh air.” Aubrey stumbles out of the room, dragging a dazed Kel with her.
“Yeah, I'm going for a walk. I need to think. Have a good– ” Hero absent-mindedly reaches out to pat Sunny on the shoulder as he leaves, then suddenly recoils from him as he realises what he did, backing away slowly. “...Goodbye Sunny.”
And now, it's just them,
alone again.
Alone together.
The miscellaneous medical equipment that kept Basil weighed down to the bed begins to blink, and gradually, to sing. And Basil is awake.
Sunny sits by him as the tears start to fall once he realised what had happened. Despite his aching, well, everything, he clambers into the rickety hospital bed beside him. He rests his head on Basil's shoulder, the blonde's wavy hair tickling his forehead, in spite of the bandages.
“It's over, Sunny.” Basil smiles at him through the sobs.
“It's over.” Sunny confirms.
And, for the first time in four years, he smiles back.