Work Text:
The call comes midway through Clive's Saturday shift, right as The Hideaway is starting to fill up for the evening. He's running a cloth over the bartop when his pocket starts vibrating— the notification foregoing Do Not Disturb, which can only mean it's one person. And he knows Clive is working tonight. Which means he wouldn't call unless...
Clive's heart drops. He throws the rag over his shoulder, motioning to Cid at the other end of the bar that he's taking a call, and has the phone to his ear before the store room door is even fully closed, muting the clatter of drinks and people and music.
"Joshua? What's wrong?"
There's a bit of wind pickup— he must be outside. It's cold. And raining. Has been all day. But that's not why there's a sniffle at the other end of the line, and Clive knows that for certain. His brother's voice comes out small.
"Can you come? Clive, can you come now? I know you're working—"
"I'm coming. Just hang tight."
Joshua's voice is still small, but the tautness has lapsed into an idle kind of relief when he responds, "Okay." There's a pause, the sound of a door opening. A voice— Her voice. Too far off to decipher the words. Clive tenses. In his mind's eye he sees Joshua on the porch steps. He knows the scene. He's witnessed it before. He's been in it before.
"Joshua, stay on the line—"
"I gotta go." The call cuts.
Clive emerges from the store room, stuffing his phone into his pocket, heart beating fast. That was the call. The call. The one he knew was coming one day, he just didn't know when. Like a tree with rotten roots, leaning further and further to one side until one day the crash comes. Impossible to predict the when, only the how.
Jacket. Keys. Wallet. Clive tosses the rag on the counter and scrubs a hand through his hair.
"Cid," Clive calls, turning a few heads down the bar where Cid is chatting up the patrons, "I gotta go."
Cid, reader of faces, doesn't ask questions. He just gives him a nod.
"I'll call Jill for backup," Clive says, distracted, swinging on his jacket.
"Don't worry about it, lad. Just get to him."
Relieved, Clive nods his thanks, and shoves out the door.
They're on the porch when he whips into the driveway. The austere outline of his childhood home on Rosalith Street looms large against a downpour that does late autumn justice.
Even in the car, even over the rain, Clive can hear their raised voices. Their mother is wrapped in one of her cashmere shawls, bitter and stiff against the wind as her lips move in some kind of reprimand, her arm flinging out in severity. Joshua stands with a backpack at his feet and his coat unzipped and loose on his frame, tall and unrelenting in the face of her wrath. He always stood tall like that, even when he was little. Clive doesn't think he ever did, not even the day he left. He just packed his car with bags and regret and relief and drove off with an empty passenger seat and a heavy heart. But Joshua… Joshua faces her like a storm, fists and jaw clenched and eyes like fire. He interrupts her, steps forward into her space, flings his arm out too, points at something far off and invisible.
Clive throws the car into park, and his hand is on the door handle when Joshua turns. Their eyes meet across the driveway, and all at once, the fire gutters out. The storm on the porch keeps raging— harder than the real storm pouring down outside— but suddenly, with him here, with escape so close at hand, his little brother has the space to just be eighteen and worn down and scared.
Sensing the need for a quick exit, Clive pauses, waiting, holding his gaze through the windshield as the wipers thrum intermittently and the rain drums on the roof. Joshua's lips move, but it isn't loud enough to be audible at all. He doesn't even look at their mother when he says whatever it is, he just picks up his bag and swings it over his shoulder.
Their mother follows him down the porch steps and into the rain, all the way to the car. Clive unlocks it as Joshua reaches the door and climbs in, hair soaked and breath clouding as he stuffs his backpack at his feet and pulls his door shut. Clive cranks up the heat proactively.
With Joshua's door slammed in their mother's face, Clive hopes that will be the end of it, but he knows it won't be. He's proven right when her ridiculous heels click across the pavement through the beams of his headlights and she wraps on the window. Clive inhales deeply, and exhales even more deeply as he rolls it down.
"You bastard."
"Mother," he greets drily.
"You think you can take care of him better than I can? You want to pay for his hospital bills? Take him to his appointments? Where will you find the time when you work three jobs just to make ends meet and keep your trash heap of an apartment?"
Clive works two jobs. He likes to stay busy. He has enough income to get by and be comfortable enough. His apartment is the first place he's ever felt truly safe, and she's never stepped foot in it. That's why.
"He's eighteen. You can't control him anymore."
"Don't act like you haven't been planning this from the start," she hisses. "You've spent all these years turning him against me, just so you could snatch him up the first moment you got the chance."
In the passenger seat, Joshua is silent. Clive can feel the exhaustion roiling off him from here, and can tell he's gone numb. He needs this to end quickly and as painlessly as possible.
"You don't own him," he tells her, quietly.
"And you do?"
Clive wants to scoff. Only she would think it was either here or there. This or that. The only two possible options: Clive's Joshua or Mother's Joshua. Never just Joshua, and what he wants. How could it be, when all she's ever seen him as is something to possess?
When she gets no reply, she bends down, grappling her shawl tighter as if that will make any difference against the rain. The storm— hers, and the day's— has made her look a mess. Strands of hair undone from her usual tight bun, plastered across her forehead and neck. Meticulous makeup smeared just a bit beneath her eyes and on her cheeks. She isn't the carved visage of an infallible god anymore. She's just a drowned rat scrabbling for purchase on her last piece of dry land.
Her voice morphs into something new, and even if her gaze didn't shift past him, he would know she's not speaking to him anymore, because she'd never — has never— taken such a sickly sweet tone with him.
"Joshua, dearest. Listen to me. You don't have to go with him. You must understand that I do what I do to protect you. You'll understand that someday, when you're older. But for now, come inside, hm? Baby?"
Again, she receives no answer. Joshua hunkers down, scratches his arm over his sleeve.
Far beyond finished with this, Clive begins to roll up the window, but his mother snarls at him and slams her hands down before he can get it up more than a few inches, gripping at it so he can't close it the rest of the way without crushing her fingers.
"You'll regret it!" she snaps, still addressing Joshua. "You'll come crawling back to me when he fails you and you realize he can't protect you like I can, and he doesn't love you like I do—"
In one swift movement, Clive has both of her wrists in one hand. His grip is firm, but nowhere near bruising. Because he's not her. He'll never be like her. She gasps, then shrieks, offended, but he doesn't let her pull entirely away. Not fucking yet.
"Let go," he says.
"I have!" she cries, tugging. But that isn't what he means. Not the window.
He speaks slowly, and calmly. "Let him go. Don't call him. Don't text him. Don't try to contact him. I don't want to see your fucking name on his phone or mine. If he wants to see you, you'll know. If not, deal with it. Are we clear?"
It has been a very long time since she struck him. But Clive sees it in her eyes. He feels the impulse in the twitch of her wrist and tendons beneath his palm. He holds fast to her hands and her ice cold gaze both. For how long, he doesn't know. However long he needs to until the fight leaves her. And eventually, it does. Something changes behind her eyes. The rat, accepting its fate. Drenched and ruined and drowning. He releases her wrists, and she stumbles back.
"He'll come back to me," she says, righting herself as best she can. But it's a wish, not a warning.
"He'll do whatever the fuck he wants now," Clive replies, and kicks the car into reverse to pull out of that goddamn driveway for the last time.
They're down the road a good mile or two before Clive asks, "Have you eaten?"
Joshua shakes his head. Clive looks over at him as he opens his mouth, then shuts it again. Clive's brows furrow. He looks back at the road.
"What do you want?" To eat, he means, but Joshua just replies softly, "To go home."
So that's what they do.
Clive's apartment is downtown, near enough to Cid's bar that he can walk to work if he really needs to. It's not a trash heap by any means, but it is admittedly a little… cramped.
'Cozy,' Joshua called it the first time he saw it, when it was just a pull-out couch from the roadside and a few meager boxes of Clive's things. Everything in the world he had to his name, and the one person he'd trade it all for just to not have to send him back the next morning standing in the middle of it, trailing fingertips along cardboard and big black letters left in marker.
'I wish I could stay,' he'd said, and Clive didn't miss the touch of jealousy in the corner of his wistful smile as he turned. Clive had swallowed the lump in his throat. He'd crossed the room and ruffled Joshua's hair— burnt gold in the late afternoon sunlight leaking in through the tall, narrow windows, and admitted, 'Me too.'
Now he spares a glance over his shoulder every once in awhile just to check that Joshua is still following as he shuffles up two flights of steep, knee-splintering stairs behind Clive. The lock to the apartment gives way with an expert jiggle and a kick to the bottom left of the door (the landlord showed him that when he moved in— he still has no idea why it works, but it does), and they're in. It's completely dark inside, save the gray, rain streaked light coming in through the sheer curtains that Jill made him put up— "To spare your neighbor's eyes at the very least"— but Joshua knows his way around. Clive closes and locks the door behind them and shucks his coat. When he turns, expecting to take Joshua's, he finds him stalled in the middle of the dark kitchen, just looking around like he's never been there before.
Clive clicks the stove light on to give them some semblance of visibility, then approaches, puts a hand to his brother's lower back gently. For a moment, Joshua doesn't react.
"You okay?" Clive asks, though he knows Joshua isn't really. But, to his surprise, Joshua nods. And really, looking at him now, he does seem it. Beneath his coat, the tension has lifted from his shoulders, and he's looking around the apartment the way Clive did when he first pushed through the door with a single box piled haphazardly with his belongings balanced on his hip, and an old set of new keys in his hand. Like, for the first time, he's only a little bit afraid, and it's only of the uncertainty of tomorrow instead of the inevitable return to a house he never asked to be tied to, on a street the length of which causes dread in the pit of his stomach.
"Is it real?" he asks. He looks at Clive. "Am I really here? To stay?"
Clive gives him a small smile, kisses his temple, nods. "Forever, if that's what you want."
Turning so their foreheads are pressed together, Joshua curls his fingers in the hair at the nape of Clive's neck and says, "It is."