Chapter Text
Roque’s mom has a port-wine stain on the back of her neck that spreads up past her hairline. Sebas has a hard time believing something so angry looking isn’t painful, but he’s been assured it only itches in the winter time. Right now, it almost shimmers under the effort of her passionate dish washing. Sebas moves to help dry a plate before Roque gently pulls him back down onto the barstool.
“She won’t let you.” He chuckles mildly. It’s almost drowned out by his mom’s - Laura’s - trailing recount of the family’s recent activity. Sebas likes her accent. It has a lilt to it that matches the soft bounce of her shoulders, and he finds himself smiling when she lifts her hand from the dish water to tap pointed fingers at her chest, uncaring of the dampness it leaves on her shirt. He glances over to see Roque with the same sheepish grin.
“I just don’t understand why your sister is so very opposed to paying nothing in dormitory fees at Duesto, as if being able to eat and sleep at home is so terrible-“
Roque grimaces in a way that tells Sebas this is a long debated topic.
“Mamá, she’s been your baby for so long, I think she just wants to grow up and, you know, spread her wings.” He made an unenthusiastic flapping motion with his left hand. Laura scoffed and turned her head.
“You’re all my babies. And I would like to be able to see and hear my babies as much as I can. Not just for holidays or when something terrible happens.”
If she notices the air stiffening around the two of them, she doesn’t show it. Instead she shakes her head and continues on listing Roque’s youngest sister Isabella’s other poor decisions.
Roque leans closer and wraps an arm around Sebas’ shoulder, curling the tips of his fingers into the divot of his clavicle before kissing his temple. Sebas marvels at the novelty of not needing to hide from a parent. He marvels more when Laura turns towards them, hands ripely red from scrubbing, and kisses Roque on the cheek and him on the crown of his head before tapping into the hall for a dry dish towel as if that were the only thing wrong in the world.
Gratefulness has always fit oddly on him.
Roque hadn’t asked to see the text his father sent him two hours after the trailer dropped. He feels like the objective reality is that he’d had enough pain over the last week to last several lifetimes, and didn’t want or need to take a peak at Sebas’. There’s a selfish bite in him that’s appreciative of it, eager to hold his misery behind his eyelids like he always has. But it’s not a thing you can thank someone for. He wouldn’t know the shape of the words even if it was.
There’s words to express thanks for being allowed to stay with Roque’s family, for lodging and shelter from his own mistakes, but he they sit tepid and uncomfortable at the back of his throat like a pill swallowed wrong. When he manages to draw a pitiful “Thank you.” out as Laura tuts over him - buttons his shirt, lobs another helping on his plate - it feels like pulling something out of the kitchen drain, inky and anomalous.
He wonders if she sees him the same way, some trailing, pitiful mass as she leads him through the grocery store. He’s dreaded leaving the flat since their arrival. The fear that the paparazzi, Olympo stooges, or the ADL will swarm and cart them off and away from each other never to be seen again has lodged hard and firm in his mind. It sits like a familiar piece of coal between his eyes, crossing them and making him numb with focus until Laura tugs at his sweater.
“Sorry.” He mutters quickly as he rejoins reality. It’s almost centering, grounding. “I’m sorry” has always been easier than “Thank you”.
Laura doesn’t seem like she heard him. She’s squinting at a notepad with a faint seashell pattern and moving her lips silently. When she turns to him her eyes are closed and he’s, absurdly, frightened that she’s going to reprimand him. She doesn’t, of course. When she opens her eyes they’re bright and unconcerned, and her voice tumbles out with the same melodic ease it always has.
“Could you go back and grab some more onions? I forgot about the salsa criolla.” She says and wiggles her head around in a ditzy motion.
He’s pretty sure he can do that. It’s a modest sized grocery store and the vegetable section is only a couple aisles back. He plans out the route in his head, opting to take the slightly longer path through the freezer aisle where people are less likely to linger and takes the floral bag with two existing onions with him.
Sebas manages to make it past the corner marking the end of the dairy section before feeling the telltale shiver of dread patter down his neck. It’s with a near paralytic level of caution that he turns to look behind him, as if fearing the potential confrontation will issue an extra dimension of harshness as a penalty for his anxiety. When he finds nothing but a smattering of other shoppers along the aisles he gives a shuttered exhale of half relief and moves forward.
The produce department has a terrifyingly open structure offering nothing in the way of obstacles to hide him from any onlookers. He tries to keep the constant flittering of his eyes across the room disguised by a purposeful gait and half-lidded gaze, but he’s reasonably certain by the time he passes the tomatoes that he just looks like some sort of well groomed, paradoxically health conscious drug addict. He’s too busy shoving a couple more onions into the bag to think of a different strategy before he makes his way back.
The aisles are somehow longer on his trek back to Laura, the corners wider and more foreboding with the threat of a surprise attack. He keeps looking back over his shoulders, convinced that his embarrassing appearance amongst the vegetables has exposed him to every malicious party simultaneously. The weight of his idiocy, twofold for both venturing out with Laura and for indulging in the surely psychotic delusion that he’s being pursued in a goddamn grocery store, trails behind him.
When he finds Laura missing from where he’d left her the feeling engulfs him. It devours even the speckled linoleum beneath his feet until he’s floating in a primordial miasma that shrieks at him to run even as it swallowed him whole. The image of Roque being hauled away by men in white bleeds from its constant home in the back of his mind into his sight and his blood chills and seizes. His hands and feet suddenly become nebulous entities as terror pushes him into movement, pulls him backwards and forwards again to look down every row for the assurance of her ruby cardigan, the loose ball of dark hair held up by her patterned scrunchy.
When the rows are littered with people but empty of the one he wants, the panic for her safety coagulates into a bonafide hysteria for his own. Every step pulls him further and further into the cloud of his nightmares raised into flesh, tangible reality. His heart threatens to crack his own ribs as he checks what feels like the dozenth aisle and finds nothing but the blur of a man looking at toilet paper. The final, desperate thought that he’d be better off sprinting out of the store while he still can stutters to a stop along with his feet when he feels the vibration of a phone in his pocket.
Laura
He can’t feel the press of the screen against his face or the plastic casing in his hand. The sound of her voice is the only evidence that he hasn’t just dropped the phone in his panic.
“Sebas, I’m by the spices if you can’t find me. Did you get lost?”
The relief is disorienting. His mouth must have gone numb with the rest of him because his answer feels more like, sounds more like it’s coming from someone else than his own body.
“Okay. I’ll be there in a minute.”
He corrects on the journey back, straightens his spine and shoulders and quells the fear into twitching submission with heaves of breath as subtle as he can manage. He drives the point of his incisors into the flesh behind the corner of his lips until the crying out of nerves is enough to quiet the remnants of droning panic.
It’s a shape of himself he knows well. It feels like putting on a freshly ironed suit or jelling his hair, a suit of armor stiff and starched on his skin. Something his mother would cup his cheek for and tell him how handsome is, her baby boy. He shakes the memory off with what feels like his entire body, slots the armor back into place before he can feel embarrassed for it.
It falters when he sees Laura peering down at her notepad again near the bags of flour. He’s reminded, starkly, of just how awkwardly gratitude sits in his hands when he feels himself try and fail to rush towards her in a way that isn’t wholly bizarre and conspicuous, only to stand haltingly in place when he reaches her. When she looks over at him she only smiles, apparently uncaring.
“Did you get lost?” She half chuckles. He looks to the side, willing the shame into vapor.
“A little.”
She looks down at his hands.
“You got the onions?” She asks gently.
He looks down himself, mortification shaking him out of the lesser embarrassment as he finally realizes he’s been standing with the bag stiffly at his side as if it contains a severed head or something equally appealing.
“Oh.”
Laura just smiles again and puffs a soft breath out of her nose. She brings her hand up and pats his cheek.
“You’re cute.”
They keep walking.
“How was the grocery store?” Roque asks when they walk into the flat, looking entirely too smug for Sebas’ liking. Sebas squints his eyes petulantly before glancing at Roque’s new wrist brace. He takes in the detail of its enhanced bulk and bright blue coloring before quickly looking to the counter and plopping down a bag of spices. It’s louder than he anticipated and he winces at the sound.
Roque gets up to help before being aggressively shooed back to the living room by Laura. He throws his hands up in defeat and winks serenely at Sebas while walking in reverse until he reaches the carpet. Sebas finds himself similarly waved off, though with admittedly less fervor once everything is unloaded and ready to be stowed away in corners he isn’t familiar with.
He joins Roque on the sofa, stiffly accepting the arm around his shoulders before willing himself to relax. He reasons the discomfort is over Roque’s father sitting in an adjacent chair, despite knowing the man to be fully accepting of his son. He’s not even paying particular attention to the present moment as he scrolls idly on his tablet, scowling occasionally. Sebas is still thankful for the distraction of modern technology, along with the drone of Uruguayan news on the television. He’s doubly grateful for the fact that there appears to be nothing catastrophic occurring on an international scale. A part of him hoped the thought would make their current situation seem small and inconsequential, a blip compared to the regular horrors occurring in the world at large. There’s a chasm where the relief should sit inside him. He leans closer into Roque’s hold like it will somehow tether him.
“What did the doctor say?” He murmurs quietly enough that he doubts Roque’s dad can hear it.
“The same thing Olympo’s doctors did. It’s bad, but with enough time and physical therapy it should get back to normal. Eventually.” There’s a bored edge to his resignation, like he’s tired of the unrelenting misery of the past few weeks the way he would be tired of the same meal over and over, the same song on the radio.
“Do you think the doctors here are good enough to take care of it?” Regret settles as soon as he says it, gets lit up into a hot plume when Roque retracts his arm a bit and twists to look at him.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean… compared to the HPC.” He hopes the desperation cools to simple caution by the time it leaves his mouth.
Roque scoffs and resettles against him.
“I don’t know what the HPC staff is capable of at this point. They’d probably make it worse if I went back now.”
He pauses.
“If they even let me back in the building.” It’s quiet, said under his breath like he isn’t sure if he wants Sebas to hear it. Fair enough, he thinks, considering he has nothing to respond to it with. He squeezes the hand over his shoulder and hopes it suffices.
“Any word from your family?”
The idea of putting his problems on Roque right now feels like throwing a wet towel on a drowning person. The idea of lying feels like throwing a dumbbell on them. Sebas feels his face pinch in dread. He had been hoping that the walls of Roque’s childhood bedroom would provide a refuge from their current predicaments, as if its soft linens and remnants of adolescence could somehow pull time back to a simpler, less miserable memory. It was a stupid kind of hope considering they wouldn’t be in this room in the first place if it wasn’t for that misery, he thinks. He frowns, knowing he’s running out of time to answer.
“My sister texted me.”
“What did she say?”
Sebas shifts around, pulling the covers up and then lowering them again. The weight of Roque’s stare, clearly expectant even through the filter of a sideways glance, hangs heavily in the inches between them. Sebas swallows.
“That I’m still her brother.” He mutters breathlessly.
He knows Roque probably considers it the bare minimum, and is possibly proven right when he only responds with a faint nod. Sebas doesn’t really know how he feels about it. He kind of wants to throw up when he thinks of it. It’s been four hours and he hasn’t responded.
“Nothing from your brothers?”
He’s been avoiding the thought of his brothers as if the mere idea of them would level some sort of hex on an already dire situation. He just shakes his head and hopes, selfishly, that Roque will take the hint. When he hears the blunt sound of Roque putting his phone on the bedside table he feels himself relax an increment.
The lights are off soon after and Roque curls around his back, bringing his wrapped hand up Sebas’ chest. He nuzzles behind his ear before kissing the delicate skin there.
“It’ll get easier.” He whispers.
Sebas nods. He wishes he believed him. He wishes more that he could squeeze his hand.