Chapter Text
The first time it happens, reality is already reduced to a suggestion. It's the night before her big recital and the only thing keeping her from tripping into the hedges lining the driveway is Henry’s hand on her shoulder, and he’s hardly the paragon of sobriety himself. “Shit,” she mumbles, grabbing onto him to steady herself as a wave of nausea crashes into her.
because the premise of this fic asks you to accept some universe-bending shenanigans, it was important to me that we start with this idea that “reality is already reduced to a suggestion,” which is why natalie had to be high as a kite for this scene haha
“Whoa,” he says dumbly—he’s so dumb but he’s the best mistake she’s ever made, she laments. “Are you sure you can get back in through the window by yourself?”
i like slipping in little lines like the “he’s so dumb but he’s the best mistake she’s ever made” that feel sort of tangential to show a character is inebriated/not as focused on their train of thought as usual. also, i love henry. he’s trying his best
She blinks, hard, trying to convince herself that yes, she is perfectly capable of getting into the window, mostly because her only other option to get in would be to wake up her parents and ask. Evening Natalie had remembered the Valium but not her keys, and they haven’t had a spare under the doormat ever since her mom threw it into the sewer during a particularly bad fit a few months ago.
“Don’t worry,” she tries to say, to perhaps unsuccessful results, “I’ve got this.”
Before he can question her on this, she pats him on the shoulder and strides—stumbles, really—toward the kitchen window on the side of the house. It’s high for a first floor window because their house is built on an incline, but it’s the only one they frequently leave unlocked because it’s the first one to be thrown open when the fire alarm goes off.
this is totally not inspired by me getting locked out of the house and having to climb in through a window hahaha…
but also the house being built on an incline is inspired by the line “everything is balanced here and on an even keel”—notoriously, it’s difficult to get an even keel for a structure when, y’know, you’re not building on flat land. the house might be as level as it can be inside, but houses built on inclines have to be a bit different because the builders had to work to make that shit livable. likewise, it’s possible for the goodmans to act out a semblance of normalcy and stability but there’s undeniably more work and creativity required to get to that point, and even then, it doesn’t always look quite the same as other households
At this hour, no one should be around to see her ungracefully kick off a rusted pipe and hoist herself up. Her parents have been turning in earlier than usual ever since her mom started seeing that new therapist four times a week, and their next door neighbors are an elderly couple Natalie seldom even sees leave their home. As long as she doesn’t make too much noise, she should be—
timeline indicator! four times a week situates this scene around the time of “i’m alive”
A hollow clang rings out as her foot catches on the handle of a pot left on the stove, sending it hurtling to the floor. She mutters a curse under her breath as she scrambles to get the rest of her body over the threshold.
It’s just her fucking luck the impact cracked the floor tile. She’s about to ponder the odds of her parents not noticing if they haven’t already woken up to the commotion when she hears a creak from the direction of the hallway leading into the kitchen.
we’ll get to gabe in a second but a note about the broken tile—the idea for this is fully inspired by the fact that the tile right beneath the stove in my childhood home’s kitchen is cracked, and i realized far later than i probably should’ve that it must have been from someone dropping a pot on it LOL
Standing in the doorway is a teenage boy—the low lighting obscures most of his features, but she can make out dark, unkempt hair and an angular frame peeking out from beneath an oversized gray hoodie. He is not familiar, but she’d recognize that hoodie anywhere.
pov you’re failing to get your homework done in the living room and you hear a strange noise from the kitchen so you go check it out and find your dead sister picking up a pot off a broken tile. truly a testament to both their mental states that neither of them burst out screaming here
also i love gabe’s fuckass hoodie being the same one diana wears so :)) in my head, it was originally diana’s when she was pregnant and he really liked the texture as a kid so once he grew into it, it just became his. yes this means the hoodie is older than both of them. they don’t make clothing like they used to, alright
“Oh, what the fuck?” both she and the strange boy breathe out at the same time.
Natalie groans, rubbing her eyes. “I’m too high for this,” she grumbles.
He points at her, almost accusingly. “I’m not,” he says.
one of my favorite exchanges in the series tbh—i wanted this first part of the conversation to feel a little hysterical so even though gabe’s freaking tf out and natalie’s desperately trying to cling to it being the drugs’ fault, they get a bit of fun banter as a treat <3
“Gold star to the hallucination, then,” she deadpans, pinching the bridge of her nose. The shock of knocking over the pot sobered her enough that she feels less like she’s floating through time, but clearly she’s still tripping on something if she’s seeing him now.
there’s not a great place to point this out so i’ll put it here—natalie, to me, uses her sarcasm to push people away and cover up/stave off her anxiety as a means of protecting herself. she defaults to the deadpan here because she’s trying to shut him down quickly
That, or it’s not the fault of the drugs. But she’d rather not consider that possibility.
“I’m not the hallucination,” he says. “You are.”
“Incorrect,” she says, moving to set the pot back on the stove. Surely no one pays attention to the state of the floor when cooking, she thinks. Or is it smarter to just leave the pot on the ground and pretend some other force knocked it off the stove?
so this isn’t super obvious but having natalie say “incorrect” is me bullying gabe bc remember his whole thing is feeling stupid in comparison to his genius dead sister, and within the first minute of talking to her, she’s already hit him with this line :/ (but this is why he breaks SO quickly after this)
“I—” She looks back over her shoulder to see the boy leaning heavily against the wall next to him, forehead pressed to the wood paneling. His breathing is visibly labored, hands trembling even as he reaches out to brace them on the wall.
Seemingly to himself, he mumbles, “I am not crazy.”
Of course even her hallucinations have anxiety, Natalie laughs inwardly, though something in her chest twists in empathy, even if she doesn’t believe he’s real. “You’re not the crazy one,” she says after a moment.
someone pointed out in a comment before how hilarious having to calm down your hallucination from an anxiety attack would be if gabe wasn’t actually real and yes 100% and that’s exactly the sort of shit natalie thinks her brain would put her through
He makes a wounded noise, still shaking like a fawn. She swallows.
The sane thing would be to walk away, to ignore the ghost of a boy she’s never known well enough to grieve and sleep off whatever horrible concoction of drugs is thrumming in her veins. But ‘sane’ isn’t a Goodman trait, and he’s blocking the only exit to the room besides the window, so Natalie crosses the room and sighs, “Come on, you have to breathe.”
small thing but her crossing the room is sort of her crossing the line for the first time + treating him like a person, even when she doesn’t yet believe in him
He shudders through an inhale, and his trembling legs must finally give out on him because he seems to collapse forward. Instinctively, Natalie lunges to grab him by the arm, and he all but buckles into her grasp, his other arm looping around her shoulders, face falling into the crook of her neck and oh, she didn’t expect this. He’s solid. He’s warm.
catch him he’s falling <33 obviously this is riffing on that song, and this idea of catching/holding each other will be referenced a few times throughout this fic. the big payoff is obviously at the end but there’s also a more subtle one before then that i’ll point out when we get to it
He pulls back enough to stutter out an apology—he has Mom’s eyes, a hysteric part of her notes—and Natalie shoves him away from her, ears ringing. His back hits the wall with enough force to jostle one of the frames hanging on the wall, and both of their gazes snap over to watch it slide sideways, ever so slightly.
natalie catches him but immediately shoves him away because she’s NOT ready to deal with it right now. having him hit the wall + emphasizing that the force is enough to jostle a frame on the wall is, of course, a way of injecting a bit more energy into this scene, but also meant to give them another detail to account for—it makes their actions have more of a tangibility to them to each other since natalie can hear gabe hitting the wall + see the frame move, and they can both feel each other
Before she can unstick her feet from the floor, he takes another shaky breath and walks over to silently straighten the frame.
“I don’t get it,” he whispers, not turning his body to face her but angling his chin just enough that she catches a glimpse of dark eyes gleaming with tears. “You didn’t show up when I failed my history midterm, you didn’t show up when Mom freaked out the other day, or when I was high out of my mind yesterday—I don’t get it. Why now?”
in my head, the framing of this moment has natalie standing justtt on the edge of gabe’s periphery, and remember, it’s pretty dark at this point so she kind of looks like a paralysis demon lol
he tilts his chin but doesn't turn his full body because he’s too scared to acknowledge her fully by Looking At Her, so instead he’s mostly looking over his shoulder (yk. the way you look over your shoulder to check for people following you on the street—that. that is a common thing other people totally do, right. i’m not paranoid. anyway i intended for this to be read as gabe applying an appropriate level of wariness even as he’s tempted to indulge the thought that she might be real)
She opens and closes her mouth, feeling a bit like she’s missed a step on the stairs. The only response she can get out is a faint, “What?”
He stares at her like he’s waiting for her to suddenly come up with a revelatory response to his rambling, but any semblance of a working brain cell has long since clocked out for the night, so she just shakes her head, tangling a hand in her already-mussed blonde hair. “I need to lay down,” she says, trying to step past him.
“You have her hair,” she hears him mutter as she stumbles by him, making her pause.
“You have her eyes,” she whispers back, not daring to turn around.
pov you’re me squinting at photos of caissie levy trying to see her eye color before going “fuck it the line’s too good not to use regardless”
He groans. “I know.” He lets out a dry laugh. “Clearly I do, if I’m seeing you too, now.”
And finally, the pieces click in Natalie’s mind. She gets what game her own brain is playing on her.
Natalie whirls around. “You’re—”
(“—like me”)
The words die on her lips as she realizes there’s no one behind her to hear.
Natalie swallows. It’s fine, she tells herself as she stumbles to her bedroom. It’s just the drugs. She’ll sober up in time for her recital tomorrow, and her parents will show up to watch, and she’ll get that Yale scholarship, and everything will be fine.
…oh buddy
Everything is not fine.
Her parents don't show up to her recital, and she frankly wishes the Yale representatives didn't either, given her performance, but she doesn't even get to stew in self-loathing about that because her mother has ensured the title of Household Crisis of The Week goes to her attempt to join Natalie's brother in haunting the rest of them.
Natalie shouldn't be mad. She should be a doting daughter, worried out of her mind for her mother's wellbeing—and she is worried, but that worry is eclipsed by her immutable anger. Of course the timing coincides with her catastrophic recital. Of course Natalie will never be given a chance to just be mad.
natalie’s anger here is really important to me; she’s at the end of her rope and her parents aren’t giving her room to just. have her own feelings. obviously in the musical we see her start to take this out in other ways (rip henry) but going into writing this second scene, i wanted her (and gabe) to get a chance to vent their frustrations and snap at each other, especially while they’re not fully convinced the other is real, therefore lessening some of the guilt they might feel about saying some of this
The second time she sees him happens the day after her recital.
She leaves the hospital before visiting hours end, just so she has time in the house alone while her father tries to pretend he's keeping it together at his wife's side. It's because she specifically planned for this alone time that she immediately notices the footsteps that shouldn't be present.
She knows it's not her father home early just by the weight of the steps—her dad's steps are always far too heavy for their wood floors, while these ones are lighter, quicker. They lack the trepidation of someone actively trying not to be noticed, but Natalie can tell from the way the person avoids the loudest floorboards in the hallway that it's someone used to sneaking around this house.
i pondered how gabe’s steps might be described here for a While: for narrative purposes, he had to be audible but seeing as he’s the invisible one in his world, him being light-footed without trying felt apt. the secondary detail about him avoiding the loudest floorboards is an easy subtle way of seeding him also being the sneaking out type, though that’s probably already known from the prelude of the musical
Really, Natalie doesn't need to go through the process of elimination to arrive at her answer, but she's perhaps still less shocked than someone else in her position would be when the boy she never should've met walks into the kitchen in the middle of her making a sandwich for herself.
"You better not need food because these are the last slices of bread," she huffs, "and we're out of everything else."
perpetually, the goodmans are out of everything. rip in pieces
He stares at her for a moment before shaking his head. "I got food on the way home from the hospital."
"I was going to do that but I was out of cash," she says, setting her sandwich in the toaster oven to warm it. "So, yay, stale sandwich using the nasty cheese product that never expires for dinner." She makes an unenthused jazz hands motion, wondering how she's gotten to the point in her life where this makes any sense. No, scratch that, it still doesn't make sense, but she's so fucking done with it already. When did this become normal to her?
here’s some of that anger i mentioned earlier bleeding into the narration! she deserves a moment tho, can’t blame her
He snorts. "I had one of those while high once and I still thought it was shit," he says.
"See, that," Natalie says, waving a still-wrapped slice of cheese in his direction, "is how I know you're from my brain because Mom's golden boy would never be caught doing drugs."
He raises an eyebrow, slanting her one of those smug little grins that only teen boys can give. "Who says I've been caught?" he replies, walking over and taking a seat on the opposite side of the island, facing away from her. He drums his fingers on the fake marble, and Natalie instantly clocks it as following common time. "And anyway, I think it's more evidence you're from my brain instead because it makes a lot more sense for me to have the drug habit than you."
a few things:
1) sly gabe is my favorite gabe. he is also at the end of his rope but even so, he’s not passing up a chance to be a little shit, if only because hiding behind that persona helps him ignore the pain
2) the drumming his fingers to common time thing is because in light of his mother raving about her piano skill when he first got to high school, he joined jazz band, hoping she’d praise him for it, for once. she doesn’t, but he sticks with it anyway (he’s not really sure if he actually enjoys it, but he’s deep enough into it that he figures he may as well stay with it)
3) now we’re starting to dig into what this roleswap really means in terms of gabe’s world with that last line. both natalie and gabe have these idealized constructions of their dead siblings due to diana’s descriptions of them, and this scene gets them to question those :))
"I'm making a sandwich in the same room my mom decided to off herself," she snaps. "I think I've got a good excuse for the drug thing."
yay snapping at each other!! vent that pent-up frustration go go go
"You do realize that applies to both of us, right?" He tilts his head back over his shoulder, just enough that she must be standing in his periphery. "And I bet you don't have to deal with getting kicked off the football team for your GPA dropping since Mom's decided to imagine you as a child genius," he scoffs.
okay okay let’s talk about gabe’s world’s natalie: in conceptualizing this version of gabe, i knew i needed to consider the version of natalie lurking in his shadow. this version of gabe is a lot of the things that canon!gabe is imagined to be—he’s a football player (though, tbh, i do think of him more as a soccer player than an american football player bc jack wolfe looks like he’d die in a game of american football—this is why you’ll never rlly see me delve into the specifics of his sport lol), in jazz band, and a charming little blend of sly and goofy :)) unfortunately, he’s also the kid who can never compete with his imaginary sister’s perfect grades and prodigious piano talent <33 so yeah. poor guy’s got a bit of a sore spot with academics
"Oh, is that what's meant to compete with me fucking up my recital in front of the Yale scouts?" she snarks. "Football, great."
He crosses his arms. "I might've gotten a scholarship off it if I'd been able to play," he says.
"I wish someone had stopped me from going up to play," she replies. "Would've saved me from embarrassing myself in front of a hundred people."
"The whole team heard me freak out at the coach about being dropped," he counters. "You might have more people but mine were all people whose opinions I cared about."
"My—" she stumbles over naming what Henry is for a second, "—not-boyfriend was there for mine."
He lets out a dry laugh. "Same."
i’m going to be real here—i did not plan for not-boyfriend to exist AT ALL until i got to this line. i did think about his inclusion before leaving this in, though, and my justification for his existence is that gabe needed a henry-equivalent to flesh out his world
This is pointless, Natalie thinks, leaning into the island and pointedly not looking at him. She can feel his gaze on her. He's not real, she tries to tell herself. They could keep going back and forth until her father comes home and realizes he has not one, but two fucked-up women in the household.
It's stupid to waste her time arguing with what she knows is just her own brain—there's no other option for what he could be, even if part of her wishes he was real because that part of her wants to fight with a real person right now. She—
here’s the swell of that anger again, but this time we’re flavoring it with desperation and longing <3
"I wish you were real," she blurts out, then falters.
up until this point, i don’t think natalie’s ever really thought about gabe as someone she could/should grieve, and this admission is her realizing that hey. maybe she’s been robbed of something, after all. maybe she’s allowed to be upset that she had a chance to have someone she could grow up fighting with like this. maybe she’s allowed to grieve a boy she never knew.
His breath hitches. "I think," he says slowly, voice hoarse, "that we must both be all kinds of fucked to want to be around each other after that."
Natalie bites her lip hard, just to feel the sting. "Runs in the family, I guess," she says.
He laughs, burying his face in his hands. "Yeah." She thinks she hears him sniffle quietly as he shakes his head and whispers, "I don't—I don't even know your name. No one ever says it."
my main motivation in crafting the premise the way i did was to give natalie and gabe chances to interact on equal footing, thereby ensuring they’ve both got a little more agency than they do in the show AND still have ample opportunities for dead sibling angst. this moment is the pinnacle of that—they get the chance to give each other their names after their parents have kept it from them for so long, and prove they’re BOTH real :)) peak sibling bonding moment right
She shudders through a breath. Carefully, she steps around the island, until she's standing a mere pace away from him, watching him move to grip the countertop with white-knuckled fingers.
it’s his emotional support counter don’t judge him
"I don't know yours either," she admits.
Silently, he turns to look at her. His eyes are familiar.
please look closely and find him before he fades away!! they’re finally LOOKING at each other. they SEE each other. gabe’s eyes here aren’t familiar because natalie’s comparing them to his mother’s again—now, she’s thinking about how he parallels her, if she’s to believe he’s telling the truth
For a long moment, they stare at each other, neither moving. Then, like the ripping of a band-aid, he hops off the countertop, feet landing on the tile with a quiet one-two tap but he remains with his back leaning on the island, as if terrified his feet are going to give way beneath him again. Her hand twitches with the urge to steady him, and she balks at herself. She's long since accepted that touch isn't something she can afford to crave; doing so only leads to disappointment. She knows this, and she knows she doesn't know his name, so there's no point—
the significance of “her hand twitches with the urge to steady him” does immediately get brought up right after, but i want to call attention to it because it’s another instance of me taunting y’all with a “they should hug ://” moment
"Gabe." She freezes as he takes a trembling step toward her. "Gabriel, if you want what's on my birth certificate," he says, a faint laugh escaping him, and it strikes her how breathy it sounds.
had to keep the format of “gabe. gabriel” of course, but the note about how breathy his voice is is mostly because i really wanted to emphasize that natalie is paying attention to him seeming alive, and yk. breathy. breathing. heh.
"That's a shit name," she says because if she says something else, she's humoring the ghost. Except he doesn't feel like a ghost or a hallucination or a lie anymore. He's breathing. He's alive, a voice in her head screams.
*“i’m alive” starts playing in everyone’s heads*
She watches him wilt at the response, a palpable look of disappointment settling on his face that does nothing to soothe the part of her trying to be reasonable. There is no comfort in knowing her brother is dead, and there is no comfort in letting herself believe he is alive because he's not. But he feels as real as she does now, and there's no one around to tell her otherwise. There is no one around to catch her as she steps forward and says, "Natalie's written on mine."
“there’s no one around to catch her” here is repurposed to be more of “there’s no one around to stop her from giving into her own longing”
Gabe makes a quiet noise, and Natalie isn't sure if it's right to call it pained or relieved. "Hi Nat—" he chokes for a second, then mumbles, quieter, "—Natalie. Natalie."
up to interpretation if gabe calling her “nat” here is him choking in the middle of saying her full name or him testing out the nickname that he knows he might’ve called her and not being able to stomach it. i don’t actually think he ever calls her plain “nat” so the second option is still on the table
She crumbles with a wounded, "I hate you." Her voice cracks on the utterance. Everything is shattering, everything is falling apart. "I hate you, why couldn't you just leave me alone? Why did—"
"Why did you have to die?" he breaks in.
some very intentional words juxtaposed here for the imagery: “crumbles” / “cracks” / “shattering” / “falling apart” / “breaks”
however, notice that in spite of all that breaking imagery, you also have gabe finishing natalie’s sentence, a little thing aligning/coming together as they realize they understand each other
Natalie can't help but laugh. "That's my line," she says.
"I said it first," he says, stubborn. Solid. Natalie flinches.
He's matched her beat for beat, story for story, and yet he doesn't feel like a mirror image. He doesn't feel like an echo—he feels like a harmonizing voice, an equal on the stage.
an equal on the stage indeed :)
She sees herself in him, and yet, she can't see him as herself. They are simply two sides of the same coin, minted from the same metal: same mom, same dad.
title drop :D
Siblings.
She shakes her head, screwing her eyes shut. "I hate you," she repeats. "I wish I'd had the chance to hate you."
not (explicitly) canon to this universe but anyone who’s read my poem written from natalie’s pov might realize that i uh. basically stole this thought from myself. i’m such a criminal, i know
"I wish—"
His voice cuts off abruptly. She blinks her eyes open, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he's gone. Natalie stares at the empty space, trying not to wonder.
Mom keeps his birth certificate in a box with his old baby clothes. Natalie's known this for years, but she's never looked, not once. She's never wanted to—she's always feared that more knowledge would only be more ammo for an aching brain years down the line. Once she knows, she can't un-know it. Once she knows, she can't ignore it.
kind of a pandora’s box moment here; this is a tipping point for natalie (and gabe, though we don’t see him)! finally, the fear of missing an inexplicable, miraculous kindness from the universe overcomes their fear of—themselves, really
Natalie opens the box.
With shaking hands, she undoes the clasp on a faded manila envelope. The paper gets caught on the side as she pulls it out. Her breath gets caught in her chest as she reads her brother's name aloud for the first time. "Gabriel Goodman."
writing equivalent of a zoom in on her hands here—note all of the chances she has to back out/the things that impede her here: shaking hands, clasp, paper gets caught—just small details to slow down the moment. her breath getting caught in her chest is a parallel to the paper getting caught in the folder, but i also meant it as her sort of “breathing life back into him” in this world
She bites her lip. "Gabriel," she whispers to the empty room, testing the name on her lips. "Gabe. Gabe."
why does she say his name three times? uh. everything in writing groups better into threes. also i thought it was funny because of that superstition thing where saying a ghost’s name in a row three times summons it
She puts everything back the way she found it. It doesn't feel the same.
obviously i just close read why this is a tipping point in their relationship but structurally, we’re going into the third scene, which is basically the midway point. still very much in the rising action but a different stage of it, so this line is prepping you for that difference
The third time it happens is a day into their mom's new ECT schedule.
i toyed with the idea of setting this scene at different points in the timeline. ultimately, i chose this one because i wanted the newness of the ECT to align with this shift in their relationship (again, really hammering in the “it doesn’t feel the same” atmosphere). overall, this scene is working in a tonnnn of little ways to show how everything’s shifted
It's just after four in the morning—Natalie had been too distracted to concentrate on her physics homework last night and had finally given up at midnight, resolving to wake up early to finish it.
Admittedly, not much waking up had to happen. She's gotten a generous two hours of sleep, and the problems in her notebook still make next to no sense to her, and because she's not nearly ready to give up on it and write down some bullshit, she's snuck down to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee instead.
She can hear the water boiling when Gabe tumbles through the open kitchen window. He looks at her, still dressed in her rumpled sleep t-shirt with her hair in a messy heap atop her head and barely bats an eye. "Ah, it's a dead sister day," he remarks.
jumping off that last point, this scene’s setup is sort of a reversal of the very first one—gabe is the one climbing through the window while natalie is stressing over schoolwork, and even if he’s not as high as natalie was in the first scene, he’s definitely still disheveled
"Dead brother day," she returns flippantly.
compare the casualness here to their first interaction—look how chill they are with each other now :))
He unzips his hoodie and the too-bright kitchen light makes it very clear very quickly that his shirt is on inside out and backwards. "I do feel like death," he says.
okay before we talk about the shirt, note the “too-bright kitchen” as a point of contrast from the first scene
"Where the fuck did you come from?"
"I thought we were over the whole 'oh no I've gone crazy' thing already," he says.
Natalie rolls her eyes. "I meant 'what the hell were you doing that you're crawling through the window at the crack of dawn looking like you got dressed in the dark?'"
"Oh." He snorts. "Stayed over at a friend's house."
"With your shirt off."
He hums in response, glancing down at himself. "I don't think this is my shirt, actually."
Natalie lets out a disbelieving laugh. "Scandalous," she deadpans. He gives her a wry smile.
okay. let’s talk about the shirt LOL
guys i gotta be honest one of my favorite running jokes is making this fuckass night seem scandalous when all that happened is. i mean, spoilers for parallels if you haven’t read it already, but gabe literally spills water on himself and has a minor breakdown in his crush’s arms. not exactly third base (although i’d argue the vulnerability there is comparable lmfao)
"I'm an awful influence, huh?"
with that context, reexamine gabe’s reaction here and laugh—he’s very much the kind of guy who’s used to feeling like he’s playing “fake it til you make it” using his charisma all the time, and this is him shouldering that persona a bit here. part of this is him falling into the habit on instinct, but the root of it is him caring about what natalie thinks of him, which is an implicit acknowledgment of her, y’know, having her own thoughts and being her own person. beyond that, though, he’s also grasping for a sense of normalcy by trying to act out a sibling dynamic—
"Well, you're not telling me to kill myself yet, so better than expected, I guess," she replies, and he winces.
—which is hindered by them. uh. not being in a normal situation and having the teeny tiny burden of their dead selves looming over them
To his credit, he recovers quickly, playing it off with a wave of his hand. "You seem like you'd be the good kid, anyway," he says. "I'm allowed to be the fuck-up."
She stares at him. "Did you forget about the drugs and the shattering a tile while sneaking in through the window high out of my mind?"
Gabe chuckles, toeing at the broken tile. "No, I remember that," he says. "I've done worse, though. Can't show you the proof since this isn't my version of the house, but you're gonna have to take my word for it that there's at least one vase never seeing the light of day again."
She pauses. "Not your version of the house?" she repeats slowly.
"Did you not notice that before?" he asks, tilting his head to the side.
"How would I have noticed that?" she sputters. "You just said you're always the one who comes here."
He hums in thought. "I dunno, I thought a genius like you would've figured out that if I'm not from your reality, I had to be coming from somewhere," he says, moving to sit on the counter. "Unless you still thought I was a hallucination, but I really thought we were past that after the names thing."
gabe is actually very perceptive lol; sometimes he overestimates what other people notice + sometimes he dismisses the things that he notices as him imagining them, and because natalie is Smart, he assumes that she must have figured this all out ages ago. his comment here, though, is because it’s a little satisfying to feel like the smart one for once, even if he’s not fully sure he’s right
Natalie pinches the bridge of her nose. It's too fucking early to be tackling high school physics problems, let alone—what even is this, a multiverse problem?
"So, what, you just randomly disappear from your world into mine like twice a month?" she asks.
Gabe shrugs. "I don't really know how it works," he says. "All I know is this tile isn't broken when you're not in here with me. Plus the one family picture in the hall actually has me instead of you in it. Those are really the only tells besides, y'know, seeing you moping."
"You don't feel anything weird when it happens?"
"Do you?" he counters.
She shakes her head. "No, but you're the one who thinks he's reality-jumping or whatever," she says.
"I just walk into a room sometimes and find my dead sister making coffee at four in the morning; I don't know shit," he laughs. "We could both just be in some fucked-up drug comas or something—I just think the alternate universe thing is cooler and less likely to give me another panic attack."
this is probably the best opportunity i have to address the fact that yeah. there’s not really a given reason for their meetings. could i make one up? yeah. does it make a difference functionally? eh not for my purposes. there are certainly established Rules i have in mind that govern these meetings (i.e. no one else can have a chance to see them, they can’t really leave the main space they meet in (not further than the edge of the hall for the kitchen area), they can interact with stuff in the other world but the changes won’t “save” to theirs, etc.) but any explanation for how they’re meeting would be more to appease a reader rather than progress their character arcs, which are what i really care about
Natalie thinks that thinking too hard about either option is liable to give her a panic attack, so she throws her hands up and says, "You know what, sure. I like the explanation where neither of us is having a mental break."
"That's the spirit!" he says, snapping in her direction. Natalie rolls her eyes.
i don’t actually know if anyone’s picked up on this fact naturally but if you’ve read point of departure, you should know that gabe stole this little gesture from not-boyfriend <3 smth smth you pick up habits from the people you spend time with
She asks, "So, are you not actually sober or are you just a freak when you're not having a panic attack?"
"Dealer's choice," he replies with a smirk.
Natalie says, "So, both."
"Yeah, probably."
She snorts. "I'm guessing you also raided Mom's happy cabinet?"
"And apparently got tattled on by her dreams," Gabe huffs. "Honestly, I think that's the most motherly instinct she's ever had with me."
a little reference to the talk in wish i was here for flavor :))
"Same here," she laughs. "I bet Hallucination-Me's gotten more hugs in the past week than I have in my entire life."
He lets out a dry chuckle. "Now, now, let's be realistic—she's probably gotten more than both of us, combined."
"Well, good for her," Natalie drawls.
There's a pause as both of them snicker to themselves. Gabe swings his legs up onto the counter, shifting so that he's sitting crosslegged with his elbow leaning on his knee.
gabe’s obsession with counters continues. please know that he’s a funny lil guy who also sometimes sits on top of the fridge to do his homework. he just likes Perching
"You're going to get so much dirt on the counters," she says, shaking her head.
He shrugs. "Not like I make food on these ones anyway," he points out.
"There's literally three open chairs," she says.
i don’t actually remember if i used the accurate number here from the set or not, but regardless, i used three here because that leaves no room for a second child at the table. little knife twist for good measure yk how it is
Gabe makes a show of shaking his head. "The counter's superior. I get to look down on everyone from up here."
"I'm the only one in here," she deadpans.
He grins. "And I'm looking down at you, aren't I?"
i wanted to make sure that there was a bit of levity in the fic after the second meeting was so heavy, so this scene’s got a nice bit of sibling banter as a treat—it’s also a good peek into how their relationship is when they’re not sobbing/on the verge of sobbing, which will go a long way later on in giving them something happy to latch onto when grieving lol
She rolls her eyes hard enough that it makes him burst into laughter, then hoists herself up onto the kitchen island.
"I'm still taller than you," he singsongs.
"What are you, eight?" she asks.
He laughs. "It would be embarrassing if an eight year old was taller than you at—I'm guessing you're also sixteen?"
She nods. "Seventeen in March," she says, adjusting herself so that she's kneeling, therefore just tall enough to be looking down on him instead.
in my heart, gabe’s a fall baby and natalie’s a spring baby, but there’s another reason i picked march here even tho uh. apparently natalie is often given to girls born around christmas bc of the meaning. if we say gabe was born around late september, eight months from then is around juneish. for their age gap to be about a year + change, diana would’ve needed to have gotten pregnant around the same time. basically, they only JUST missed each other (which, yk, is mostly bc of the whole replacement baby thing) or diana was very very early in her pregnancy with natalie when gabe died so when they started trying for a replacement baby, they just assumed she got pregnant then. is there a reason for making this happen? no i just felt like pointing it out
As she's doing so, the coffee maker beeps, startling her enough that she has to catch herself on the chair next to her. She looks up to find Gabe mid-reach for her, which he quickly tries to play off by clearing his throat and commenting, "Coffee's done."
hey so remember how i said natalie catching gabe was setting up something other than the ending? here we are—in the first scene, natalie instinctively moves to catch gabe, before pushing him away. here, gabe instinctively goes to catch natalie when she almost falls off the counter, before trying to play it off like it never happened. slightly different, but it was important that you see them both looking out for each other that way
She gets down from the counter—Gabe's gaze follows her the whole time—and goes to grab a mug from the dishwasher. She hesitates after picking up her usual mug. "Think you'll explode if you drink coffee from another world?" she asks.
He pauses. A small smile quirks at the corner of his mouth. "I'll take one for the team and find out," he offers.
Natalie hums and pulls out a second mug, setting it on the counter next to hers.
They talk until their father—Natalie's version of their father—wakes up and comes down to the kitchen for breakfast. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gabe disappears the second before he walks in the door.
obligatory “yeah they did more bonding off screen” moment. this is mostly here so i can handwave having to include some of the info that y’all already know
"You're up early," he says in lieu of a greeting.
She shrugs. "Figured I'd get a headstart to the day," she replies, standing from her seat.
He doesn't comment on the two mugs when she sets them in the sink. She's not sure if it's because he doesn't notice or because he doesn't want to deal with it. It works out all the same, she supposes.
By the time their fourth encounter happens, Natalie has a mental list of things she's learned about Alive Gabe.
He has the same birth year as her, but the same day as her Gabe would've—though, there's an odd sense of disconnect thinking of him as separate from the Gabe she could've grown up with. She tries not to think about it.
i did this mostly to not have to consider the complications of them having different birthdays (not including the year) from their dead selves but also so there is this little disconcerting thing where they’re both forced to realize that their dead siblings are still dead and separate from their au versions
His equivalent of Henry is a boy on his school's swim team who notoriously hates 'the institution of high school football.' She frankly knows more than she'd like about his 'nice laugh' and 'infuriatingly bright eyes,' but Gabe refuses to tell her his name in case he exists in Natalie's world, too.
n-b my beloved <3
He's annoyingly likeable, but she's heard enough about siblinghood to know she should keep that one to herself.
He's a pickier eater than she thinks she ever was. He only likes his pancakes if they're still a little raw in the center—Natalie calls him a freak of nature for this one. He doesn't drink soda because the carbonation 'burns his throat'—Natalie calls him a baby for this one. He doesn't like bell peppers when they're cooked but is perfectly fine biting into one raw—she calls him a freak again for this one, then has to wrestle a bell pepper out of his hand before he can take a bite out of it in front of her to spite her.
gabe being a picky eater is a nod at how natalie’s gabe died of course, but i also stole all of these traits from real people LOL. my sister and i are the pancake one, my roommate is the carbonation one, and i wanna say my friend is the bell pepper one? i might’ve also been inspired for that one by this one girl i saw just. casually nomming on a raw red bell pepper at 10am in class one day, before accidentally dropping it into the center of the socratic seminar circle
mostly, those were chosen based on vibes, but also it’s a pretty random assortment of things because i wanted gabe to be the kinda guy you HAVE to have a mental list of foods he likes/dislikes and how he likes/dislikes them bc there’s no shortcut to remembering them. knowing this, it’s a special kind of dedication on display for the characters who are shown to remember his preferences (i.e. natalie + later, n-b). i will say also that gabe will, for the most part, suck it up and eat a lot things he doesn’t like in public just to avoid judgment, which again adds that layer of “you have to really know the guy to know his preferences”
He's just as scared as her. She thinks this fact gives her more comfort than it should.
"Have you noticed Mom forgetting things more than usual?"
again, hinting at gabe being Perceptive but not. super confident in his analyses
She's in the middle of loading the dishwasher when he speaks up behind her, worrying his lip between his teeth.
so i chose to have our fourth meeting start in this weird place—you’re not entirely sure if this is the start of the conversation (because it’s a very sibling thing to just walk up behind each other and start yapping) or if we’ve actually been dropped into the middle of an existing conversation—because i wanted to stick this scene in a bit of an uneasy spot, time-wise. you’re following but you’re not exactly sure where you are, and there’s almost this sense of settling as the two of them act more and more like. well, siblings. but something is nagging at you still because you know this isn’t the end
"She's barely said a word to me since she started the treatment," she says, rinsing off a plate. "I think the last time we actually had a conversation was the 'her telling me not to do drugs' one, and that was, like, two weeks ago."
He furrows his brows. "She hasn't said much to me either—but this morning, she gave me a weird look like she wasn't sure why I was there."
Natalie pauses. "Fuck, she might've done the same to me a few days ago," she says.
"Do you think that's… normal?" Gabe asks. "I wasn't really paying attention when they told me about the details because I was still mad about the game."
"Maybe," she says. "I don't think anyone in our family knows the definition of normal, though." She sets another plate in the dishwasher.
He hums in thought. "You're right," he says, and she glances over her shoulder to see that some of the tension has left his shoulders. He hops up onto the counter next to the dishwasher. "I just—I don't know. I have a bad feeling."
this scene is meant to show them in the closest state to “normalized sibling behavior” in context of them being sort of united by their worries wrought by being part of the same household (not really, but you get the picture). it’s that sort of solidarity of siblings looking at each other after their parents say something weird and silently checking that no, they’re on the same page, y’know? it’s also constantly setting up that unease for the future with the questions gabe is asking + their inability to answer them. gabe has a bad feeling, and even though natalie assures him a little, we never quite escape it
"I think that's both of our default states, Gabe," she says with a dry laugh.
"…Also probably right," he says. He shakes his head. "Do you think the ECT will actually work?"
gabe’s looking for reassurance from natalie, or at the very least, some sort of fucked-up comfort in the fact that she feels the same as him with these questions. both he and natalie want to believe things will work out, but they’ve had a lifetime of things trying to tell them they Shouldn’t
She turns the water off to give him a flat stare. "Do I look qualified to answer that question?" she asks.
"Hey, you're two for two at the moment," he points out.
Natalie sighs. "I don't know," she admits. "It'd be nice if it did but—"
"—we're not allowed to have nice things in this house?" he finishes. "Yeah. I'd call it too good to be true but I don't think anything I've heard about the process makes it sound good."
"I read so many articles about it the night they signed the papers," Natalie admits. "Freaked myself out so bad I needed a Xanax to sleep."
Gabe runs a hand through his hair. "I don't remember what I did that night, which means I probably also took something," he says with a nervous laugh. After a moment, he asks, "Do you think she'd still be like this if we'd grown up together?"
seemingly an abrupt topic change but his line of thinking here is him wondering if they both would’ve taken something if they’d been together, which led to him wondering about them growing up together. i think this is a line of thinking they’ve both had come up multiple times since meeting each other, but they’ve never allowed themselves to follow it by themselves
"You're full of questions today," she comments. "And not the fun kind."
He winces. "I think too much about stuff, I guess," he says. "I can do fun questions, uh—what's your favorite color?"
"That's your idea of a fun question? What is this, a bad date?"
Gabe slants her a pointed look. "I would be concerned if it was a good date," he retorts.
"Gross," she says, wrinkling her nose. "Yeah, okay. I don't know, I've had other things to think about than my favorite color since I was, like, ten."
"Mine's green," he says with a shrug. "What was it before, then?"
gabe is just a green guy i will take no criticism
She's quiet for a moment. "Yellow," she admits.
He snorts. "Like piss?" When she shoots him a glare, he laughs and waves a placating hand. "I had to, I had to! Yellow's nice—it's, like, the color of sunshine."
truly the brother reaction of all time but in-universe, here’s the reasoning for the sunshine nickname. gabe from this moment forward associates sunshine and brightness with natalie, which you’ll also see in the ending
"You're an asshole," she huffs, but there's no heat behind it.
"So I've been told," he says. "Would you rather find a person living in your attic or ten thousand roaches?"
seemingly an abrupt topic change, and—yeah, this one’s just him going down his list of conversation starters in his head. i don’t actually remember where i got this hypothetical idea from ngl
She stares at him. "What the fuck?"
"I'd take the person," he says in lieu of a response.
in terms of efficiency, i do agree with these two LOL. there is no world where i am dealing with ten thousand roaches myself, and if outside intervention is allowed, i’m just calling the cops on the attic guy
ALSO. okay i remembered why i originally saved this hypothetical it’s because i’m a fucking nerd and i was sending it to someone to make a joke about jane eyre, which (spoiler alert for a 19th century novel ig) has arguably the worst version of the “person in the attic” trope with the person being her lover’s wife. like what. who let people believe classic literature is boring
She dries her hands just so she can pinch the bridge of her nose in exasperation. He stares at her expectantly.
Natalie sighs. "It's easier to make sure one person's gone than count all ten thousand roaches," she concedes.
"Thank you!" he exclaims, clapping his hands. "Can you believe half my team said roaches when I asked?"
She shrugs. "Honestly, I'd move if I knew one of those two things was up there. Burn the house down 'by accident' and collect the insurance money if I could get away with it."
"Okay, that—that's a bit much for a sober answer," he says with a chuckle. "If I ever need to stash a body, I'm calling you."
okay but in the au where they both live and gabe has to murder someone, natalie’s totally the person he goes to help stash the body, and she does it WELL. you cannot convince me otherwise—she will freak the fuck out and also know exactly what to do
"Calling your dead sister to help you stash a body is definitely a move the cops won't expect," she says.
He grins. "You'd totally break me out of jail if I asked, though, right?"
"Given that I've never been to your world, I don't think I'd be of much help," she says, closing the dishwasher before remembering she hasn't added the detergent yet. She goes to tell Gabe to move so she can grab some, but he seems to realize what she's doing and slides over for her.
a very small moment but again, gabe is paying attention to her while he’s talking—he notices that she’s looking for the detergent, realizes he’s blocking it, and moves over without acknowledging it
"If you could, though," he says. "You would because you—" Gabe catches himself mid-sentence, an awkward silence descending upon them as Natalie freezes with her head half buried in a cupboard with a cobweb and a box of dishwasher pods.
(“—love me.”)
because natalie is looking in the cupboard, gabe can’t see her face, which makes him panic a bit. let’s unpack the framing of this scene a bit more, though—this is natalie’s world, and throughout this scene, she’s doing a household chore while gabe basically rambles. she’s wrapped up in the goings-on of her reality, but gabe kinda throws a wrench in her ability to proceed entirely as normal. he moves over for her on the counter (trying not to actively get in her way) but here, he accidentally says something that throws her off and makes her freeze, regardless
natalie freezes “half buried in a cupboard” so she’s essentially hesitating in the middle/on a threshold (there’s also a running thing in this fic that i’ve thus far with pretty much every scene having a sort of threshold being crossed for each other—it’s the window for the first and third scene, and the gap between them during the names exchange for the second. here, natalie pulls herself OUT of her current task to assure him, not crossing this sort of “carrying on + ignoring him” threshold—and it’s because she loves him. at this point, natalie cares more about gabe than preserving her illusion of sanity/the world being “normal”
He clears his throat. "Never mind," Gabe tries to say, but it comes out painfully forced.
Slowly, Natalie pulls her head out of the dark cupboard to look up at him. Her brother is fidgeting with the string of his hoodie when she bites her lip and tells him, in the most casual voice she can muster, "I would." He stiffens. She looks away and shrugs, slipping the pod into its compartment and shutting the dishwasher again. "Just so I can laugh at you for getting caught, you know."
dark cupboard—think of the cupboard as (okay, it sounds kinda dumb when i write it out but this WAS my original intention so we’re going with it) sort of a stand-in for the way natalie views her future: it’s dark. there’s cobwebs (past memories taking up space/making a mess) but also dishwasher pods (what she’s ultimately looking for/needs to finish her task and clean things up). gabe’s disrupting this idea but he’s also pulling her back into a room and making her realize that the cupboard’s darker than the overall room. she’s discounting her future as dark when she’s still got light in front of her
"Of course," he says. It only comes out a little choked.
Natalie turns on the dishwasher to save them both from the silence, but she knows both of their brains are anything but quiet as it sputters to life.
Part of her laughs—isn't that a crazy thought? She knows her dead brother well enough to know what he must be feeling.
i like to think this part speaks for itself but this actually wasn’t the original ending for the scene—i don’t actually remember what i had in my first draft, but i changed it to have natalie asking an impossible question, just for that parallel with gabe
Maybe she's more like Gabe than she thought because her next passing thought is another paralyzingly impossible question:
Would we have loved each other if we'd grown up together?
When Mom returns from her latest ECT appointment later that evening, she stutters over Natalie's name. She has to bite back a snide remark about how even her dead brother from another world knows that one. She wonders if he's doing the same, a world away.
When Mom returns from her latest ECT appointment later that evening, she stutters over Gabe's name. He catches himself before he asks if she at least remembers her other kid, before he asks if dying is the only way he can ever be held by her. He wonders if his sister's doing the same, a world away.
a note about both of these parts: many people have yelled at me about these two paragraphs, and i must confess i totally wrote both of these and proceeded to not look at them again lmfao. the structure here is because i needed a “hinge pin” sort of thing for the shift to gabe’s perspective, and i thought the juxtaposition of the same sentiment from each of their eyes was a good way to do that
i will highlight the use of the phrase “he catches himself” here because of the whole “catch me i’m falling” thing being a recurring theme—the only other time (at least, as far as i know) that gabe “catches himself” is in the previous scene, where he stops before saying natalie loves him, and she does, ultimately affirm him in that moment. compare that to this one, where he has to catch himself before saying something to his mom, and she doesn’t give him that same support; she lets him fall
The fifth time they meet, Gabe knows it will be the last.
pls know that i wrote this line and immediately went “oh i’m gonna get murdered in the comments”
He's lingering in the hallway like a ghost as he listens to his mother pack her bags. All he'd wanted was a glass of water, but then he heard the crying, and—
low-hanging fruit but what was i gonna do, not make the ghost comparison?
His father chokes on a sob, and even from out here, Gabe can tell he's talking to the empty kitchen counter as he asks, "Why didn't you go with her?"
—it feels like a shudder runs through the universe itself. He can't see anything through the darkness but behind him he hears a quiet, "Oh."
Natalie must be close to tears; he can hear it as she whispers, "I think my world's a bit ahead of yours. I just came from—" she hesitates, "—my version."
so mechanically, this scene is a bit odd because not only is it the only time natalie crosses into gabe’s world, but it’s also the only time it’s implied that their worlds are moving at different speeds in any way; i set this up this way because 9/10 times in fics, gabe tends to be on the upper hand in terms of knowledge about how things are, and i really wanted to see a scene in which, if either of them was going to be the Knowing One, it was natalie. besides that, it serves to imply an increased separation between their worlds, furthering gabe’s instinct that this is the last time they’ll meet because their worlds are no longer as closely intertwined on a beat by beat basis
"I don't suppose it has a happy ending?" he laughs weakly.
The shadow of his sister shifts. It catches him off guard when pale arms come to wrap around him, a familiar tangle of curls pressing into the crook of his neck, but his arms shoot up to return the hug as if by instinct. He wishes they could've done this enough for it to be instinct. "One day," she vows.
watching the proshot, i always thought the way gabe moves in “i am the one (reprise)” felt a bit like watching a shadow shift along a wall, hence that first line of the paragraph. note again the “catches him off guard” phrasing coupled with the physical contact this time—they finally get that proper hug after all those teases. natalie initiates it this time, and they both allow themselves to be held :))
The embrace ends too quickly as that same shivering feeling jolts down his spine, now. He can tell Natalie feels it too.
the “shivering” descriptor was used because it’s short and visceral and does its job in the sentence, so it’s here. that said, when i was writing them feeling these sort of “tremors” in the universe, i was in fact thinking like a fucking nerd because i was working on a project about birds, so this was partly inspired by birds that have this thing called “remote touch,” which is basically an ability that many shorebirds have that lets them sense movement of prey buried in the dirt near them (but notably not touching them. basically, they can “feel” movement of things shifting around them but not directly touching them). SO the feeling gabe and natalie are experiencing is basically them sensing their worlds skimming and pulling apart from each other
yes, i am aware this is a batshit explanation. i fear this is just how my brain works
"I'm not you," he whispers. "I'm not a genius. I'm not—I can't." He's not ready to lose her. He's not ready to grieve her.
“‘cause if you won’t grieve me, you won’t leave me behind” <3
and here gabe digs at his own insecurity again, this time with the looming grief attached. i don’t really explore grief as deeply in this fic, but i will say that, writing this, i wanted grief to exist at the heart of their relationship—this au, to me, intertwines grief and love, and what it means to have someone and lose them. all of their interactions have existed with the underlying question of what if neither of them died writhing beneath the surface, and all of their interactions have seen them bonding over and trying to recreate this sort of “lost childhood” they could’ve had.
i think this is where i point you back to that segment with the birth certificate, the good ol’ “she's always feared that more knowledge would only be more ammo for an aching brain years down the line. once she knows, she can't un-know it. once she knows, she can't ignore it.” this is them reckoning with that reality—they know, now, what that world could’ve looked like, how their relationship could’ve been. it hurts, yes, but also—wasn’t it worth it?
She chokes on a wet laugh, wiping her nose on her sleeve. "I'm just as fucked-up as you and you know it," she says fiercely. "And we're both going to be fine because we have to be. We have to. You know that."
i relistened to “light” about a hundred times trying to write this part. i’ve never really thought natalie gets the full closure she needs at the end of it (which is part of why i wrote point of departure) because she’s sort of forced to embody this optimism that feels more rooted in desperation rather than a real shift to her having hope. hence, i wanted her assurance here to be insistently optimistic, but also unable to articulate a reason why everything is going to be okay beyond “we have to be” because i don’t think she’s found that reason yet
In the kitchen, he hears his dad gasp out an unmistakable name. "Nat. Natalie." She exhales shakily.
Gabe grasps out blindly for her hand one last time. He squeezes it, hard.
yeah this is just me twisting the knife sorry
"It'll be good," she says with a sniffle. "You'll see."
"Thanks, Sunshine," he whispers.
two references here <3 again, we see hints of that “forced optimism” in natalie referencing “it’s gonna be good” because uh. well yeah that song is the definition of forced optimism, and gabe finally gets to use his sunshine nickname from “just another day.” in “just another day,” it feels sarcastic, but this gabe is using it sincerely—in his eyes, she’s the only pillar of warmth he’s really ever had, and his hope is rooted in wanting to believe in her
Too soon, her warm hand fades beneath his touch. He swallows, hand falling limply to his side.
yadda yadda metaphor for dying you know the classic movie trope i’m invoking here with the hand falling limply and everyone being like. oh no. they’re dead
His sister is gone from this world, but he's not. The world is dark, but it doesn't have to be. He's not fine, but he doesn't have to be—not yet, anyway. He can grieve his ghosts, then lay them to rest. He can live. He will.
more of the same here, really—his sunshine’s gone so the world is dark, but he’s holding onto that glimmer she gave him. these lines are obviously very inspired by “light,” and were structured in such a way that it feels like gabe trying SO hard to see the bright side of things (see the repeated “bad thing BUT” phrasing). the final two lines of the paragraph being so short is meant to feel a bit like a mantra. he’s telling this to himself. he’s making it true
He hopes that in another world, his sister will, too.
Gabe takes a long, deep breath. Then, he steps into the kitchen, searching for a light.
yeah so remember my obsession with pointing out gabe breathing + natalie earlier “breathing life back into him” because here it is again—this time, gabe taking the breath by himself is him settling back into his life in this world, now with the strength from natalie. he steps into the kitchen (the place where they repeatedly met) to then comfort his dad, but also to find his own reason to live in this world