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—
Teddy was gone.
Felix didn't want to believe it. He didn't want to believe that he killed his own brother out of some petty childhood rivalry, but those were the facts. And Felix had to live with that for the rest of his life.
He didn't know how long it had been since Teddy's death, lack of food and sleep blended all the days into one. Was it even days? Had it been weeks? Months? If it was months, it couldn't have been more than five, because he didn't remember his birthday being celebrated. Even if his father did not care about frivolous celebrations like that – unless they were for him – Felix knew the servicemen would remember.
But, would they still celebrate it? Would they humour a killer with a party he did not deserve? Felix would rather they forget it all together. Teddy never got much attention on their birthday, but at least he was there. A birthday without his brother just felt empty. A birthday would be something he did not deserve.
Felix knew he did not deserve anything anymore, not even the most basic necessities. A lack of appetite aided his self-inflicted punishment of not eating. He had watched his father take away dinner as a punishment for Teddy many times before, and as his father was not punishing Felix himself, he took things into his own hands. It felt like less of a punishment when can barely eat willingly.
The sleep deprivation was alike in the fact that Felix would not be able to do so even if he wanted to, feeling guilty to even think of it as a punishment. Felix felt guilty a lot, and that guilt crept into his every waking moment. It affected his sleeping moments too, unable to close his eyes without seeing flashes of what he had done.
The nightmares were worse.
Felix was a shell of a person, a ghost haunting his own body. He had all the revelations of his father being a bad person, yet none of the emotional complexity to process it. A child murderer is still a child, after all. He had only processed the concept of death when Teddy died, however long ago that was, and that was all too sudden and too overwhelming to process correctly.
Felix still did not know how long it had been since Teddy's death, he only knew that his father was organising a funeral.
He couldn't understand why his father was holding a funeral for somebody he was celebrating the death of. He couldn't understand a lot of things about his father. The psychology of your father is something you never really figure out unless you fall into the same habits as him, and even then, it can just make the wires even harder to untangle.
Mr. Huxley's wires were… very much tangled. Not so much on the outside, but you can pay people to shape your external image. When you're rich enough, you don't have to worry about a lot of things, because somebody is next to you to fix it. The same can't be said about how you think.
Therapy – the closest thing to somebody fixing your brain – existed, of course. Felix knew his father's views on that. It was feel-good bullshit for people who pity themselves, and Mr. Huxley pitied nobody, especially not himself. There was nothing to pity in a man as capable as him.
Capable was a stretch when he could barely plan a funeral, even with the assistance of the servicemen that he ending up putting the entire workload on. It wasn't even in a real funeral in a real graveyard, just ordering somebody to make a grave in their backyard. There wasn't even any body to bury. Felix didn't know what they did with it.
There was a hesitance in Felix actually attending. He wanted to, of course he wanted to. It was the least he could do after… everything. The funeral itself wasn't the reason for Felix's hesitance, it was everything that surrounded the funeral.
Felix wished Teddy was getting a proper funeral. In a church, with a proper sendoff, and with prayers that Felix wouldn't believe in. He hoped there was a Heaven so Teddy could go where he'd deserved, but his own selfishness also hoped the opposite. Felix knew where he'd be going after death.
There was also the self-centered reason for Teddy to not be getting a funeral just outside the manor, and that was because Felix was starting to hate the manor. It always felt too big and too empty, but without Teddy's presence to distract him, the emptiness became all-consuming. Teddy shouldn't be buried in the same environment that killed him.
This was the place where Felix killed him. God, he could barely leave his room. He couldn't retrace the steps down the hallways where he chased his brother, he couldn't step into the room where his body was laying. Cold, unmoving, lifeless.
On the rare occasions where he did need to use the bathroom – which was not often, you don't need to as much when you're only drinking the bare minimum water to keep you alive – he would walk all the way to the smallest one, with not as much furniture and half the decorations. The differences made life a little easier.
He'd still flinch when he walked past Teddy's empty room. The door being closed did not make anything easier. It still served as a reminder of his demise.
Felix decides to attend the funeral. Teddy deserved at least one attendee who cared about him. The servicemen would be indifferent at best, and glad at worst. After all, Teddy's death just meant one less person to worry about. It wasn't as if they'd be upset at his death, his father beat out any ideals of caring about his children. They were the ones assisting in covering up his death, after all.
And his father… Felix still couldn't untangle those wires enough to understand why he was holding a funeral for a death he wanted. Maybe it was more a party than a funeral, celebrating the death itself rather than celebrating Teddy's life. The specifics of his intentions didn't matter to Felix, they couldn't. All that should matter was his brother was getting a funeral that he was going to attend.
On the day of the funeral, it's just Felix and his father.
It was a family matter, his father says. Like everything else his father said, it was easier to just believe that at face value. Family did not matter to his father, unless they were able to make some sort of profit or entertainment for him. Felix knew that he had just killed his father's main source of entertainment.
Maybe that was it. Maybe this was not a sendoff for Teddy, but a punishment for Felix. It was expected, considering how long Felix was going unpunished for murder. Considering the fact that his father was actively covering up a murder – a murder that processed to Mr. Huxley as his favourite tv show getting cancelled rather than his son dying.
The ending episode was fun, sure, but now the show was over. Mr. Huxley had to find a new source of entertainment, and it wasn't as if mental torment was something Mr. Huxley was not deeply familiar with. Felix puts on the suit, baggy and hanging off his small frame, and tries not to think about that.
The funeral was short. Felix didn't expect it to be too long, because a vague grasp on your father's psyche is still a grasp on your father's psyche. He knew his father had more important things to do than pretending he ever cared about Teddy's existence past him being a mutt in a dog fight.
Felix stands in the backyard of the Huxley manor, which was a field in of itself, his father besides him. They stand the furthest they could from the manor while still standing on the land the Huxley's owned – the building was barely in sight anymore. Felix doesn't notice, his eyes are too focused on the grave in front of him.
It was small. It was not well crafted. It's engravings were jagged and made without much thought. It was alike to Teddy himself in those ways. In the middle were the chiselled letters, barely legible.
Theodore Huxley
Brother and Son
2014-2019
Felix balls his hands into fists. It was a pathetic excuse for a gravestone during a pathetic excuse for a funeral. His father could do better than that, he knew a decent tombstone wouldn't make a dent in his bank account.
The ground beneath them wasn't even dug out. It was just some rock that had been shoved into the grass.
Neither of them speak, they're just staring. Maybe if Felix stared enough, Teddy would come back. Then his father's show would be back on, and everything would be back to normal.
That thought scared Felix. If Teddy came back, would they just fight again, over and over? Were they destined to be like this in every timeline? Would Felix always end up killing Teddy? Was that just an inevitable fact to Teddy's existence, that he would always lose this stupid game?
"Well," his father murmured, snapping Felix out of his thoughts. He doesn't look away from the grave, but he can feel his father's eyes piercing into him. "That's enough of that. I'm going inside."
Felix only hears the footsteps slowly get quieter as his father walks away, not even being called in himself. He gave up on trying to understand why his father was doing any of this.
He kept staring at the grave.
—
Felix was the only visitor of Teddy's grave.
He knew he would be from the start. His father did not care, the servicemen were paid to not care. It was just him and the flowers he picked from the field – dandelions– laid messily in front of the gravestone.
Felix was still not good with time. He just knows that the time between Teddy's grave being made and it being destroyed was too short. Any time would be too short, of course, but this seemed like a particularly small timeframe.
Felix clutches the remains of the gravestone in his little hands, the same ones used to kill Teddy in the first place. For a man so hellbent on the perfect image, Mr. Huxley did not clean up the destruction he had ordered. Felix did not see it, and he was glad he didn't. It wasn't as if he could stop them.
The crumbled grave pieces lay on top his mud-covered hands, tears splashing onto the rocks. Small spots darkened from where the tears hit, much darker than the engravement was.
Phonecalls were made, money was paid, just to erase Teddy's existence. Photographs were altered to only ever include Felix. He wondered about Teddy's bedroom, the biggest proof of his existence, of who he really was. Would his father have it removed, torn down, make it clear a child never lived there? Or was this destruction only for the public eye, and his bed stays unmade?
Felix tried not to think about that. He tried really hard to not think about a lot of things surrounding Teddy's death, but he was never quite able to push them out of his brain. There was a push and pull, between repressing everything and remembering Teddy. To forget what he did would be to forget Teddy, and he didn't want that happening. Somebody needed to remember him.
His father was doing a lot of work to make sure Theodore Huxley never existed.
Felix would not forget.