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As an only child, Alex had been a bit worried about what the three younger Lynch boys would think of him. He’d never really been around younger kids, and he had been really hopeful that they would like him as much as he already liked them.
Turns out - he’s been worried for nothing. The three of them had liked him from their first meeting, and Ollie in particular adored him. Sean was glued to Johnny, and Tadhg’s little crush on Aoife was cute, but Alex was Ollie’s, something he was very adamant about. He always insisted on being on whichever side Darren wasn’t - even if it put him amidst all the adults.
Alex had mildly surprised himself by how much he loved it - it was a nice feeling, having someone look up to him so much. As such, it was no surprise when Ollie pulled himself onto the stool next to him approximately 30 seconds after arriving home. He’d shed his school bag and his shoes, his white-socked feet dangling from the stool.
He had some tiny plastic toy in his hands, making explosion sounds with his mouth. But something was off. He seemed duller, more subdued. The two younger of the three Tommen kids entered the kitchen then - Joeys first stop when he came home was always the annex, so it was no surprise that he was absent.
Tadhg sat down on the other side of the island from Alex and Ollie, drinking a glass of water.
Shannon poured herself a cup of tea and leaned her hip against the counter, chatting with Edel.
Suddenly, Ollie broke his silence (Alex hadn’t even realized he’d stopped his playing).
“Alex? What’s a fag?”
“Damn it, Ollie! I told you not to ask him that!” Tadhg exploded across the room, his head snapping up instantly.
“It’s alright.” Alex placated, attempting to ease the tension. “I don’t mind.”
Turning back to Ollie, he tried to think of a 9-year-old-appropriate way to explain the word that had followed him his entire life.
“Fag is… a word used to make gay people feel bad.”
Ollie’s brow furrowed, pensive, and he drew the corner of his lip into his mouth.
“Where did you hear that word?” Alex asked, surely no one was calling him that in third class?
Ollie looked down at the counter, rubbing his toy across its surface. “Someone said you and Darren are… that.”
Alex nodded, watching Ollie intently. Right when he thought that that was where the conversation was going to end, Ollie looked up again.
“Did people call you that? When you were in school?”
“Yes. Among other things.”
Ollie cocked his head at him, his eyes inquisitive.
“What other things?”
“They called me other names. They’d push me, take my things, stuff like that.”
It was a heavily sanitized version of events, but he didn’t need to traumatize a nine year old with the colorful language he’d been subjected to throughout his second school years.
Ollie was quiet for a moment, mulling over what Alex had just said.
“Why do people do that? Be mean? And why do they get away with it?”
Alex thought for a second, trying to create a way to teach Ollie something he didn’t quite understand himself.
“It’s easy to hate something you don’t understand. Being different, people aren’t used to that. Their instinct is not to like it, to try to stop it.”
He looked into Ollie’s eyes, trying to come up with an appropriate analogy to help him understand.
“It’s like when you’ve got a new lesson in maths. Everybody complains and- and they say they hate it and they don’t want to do it. Because it’s different. Because it’s new. Obviously it’s not quite the same, but it’s the same idea. It’s easier to hate, to be upset, than it is to understand.”
“Do other people call you names still?”
“Sometimes,” he said, choosing not to sugarcoat it. After all, he couldn’t tell him the truth, who could?
“Especially when your brother and I are out together.”
“Like if you hold hands and stuff?”
“Yes. But sometimes even when we don’t. If someone thinks we’re too close to each other or look at each other “wrong”.”
He put the last word in air quotes to signify that he did not agree with the sentiment.
Ollie was quiet again before he asked another question.
“Does it make you sad?”
The question was so innocent and childlike that it tore at Alex’s heart a bit.
Does it make you sad?
How could he communicate the truth to a child as young as Ollie? Not traumatize him but still get across the pain that he lived with every single day. How he worried that someone would attack either Darren or himself - and it didn’t help that the current social and legal climate prevented him from being able to visit Darren in the hospital if something were to happen, and vice versa. That he saw the emotional pain - and its repercussions - not just in the mirror, but in his lover.
He saw it in the way Darren instinctually flinched away from his touch in public, the way Darren pulled away to walk further from him when they were out together, how he never seemed to fully relax when they weren’t alone, always vigilant, always waiting.
The stares, the names, the rumors, the whispers, they echoed in him, in Darren, in their relationship. And those people, the ones who hurt them, who threw stones and hurled slurs, they weren’t the ones who paid for their crimes. He was. Darren was. Their victims were the ones who paid.
And he feels it now, in the Kavanagh’s kitchen as he struggles to put his experiences into a set of words palatable for a child who hadn’t even reached the double digits yet.
“…it does make me sad, yeah. Because… that hate, it doesn’t leave you. I remember the way it felt, when I was 12, 13 years old and it felt like everybody hated me. And I tried to change, I really did. I tried to be more “masculine”, to be “one of the lads”. But I wasn’t. And I’m not. And I think it’ll always be a part of me.”
Ollie’s large, brown eyes searched his own, swimming through his thoughts and emotions, trying to create his own understanding of what he’s just learned.
“Was it the same for Darren? Were they mean to him too?”
He was taken aback, a bit rocked by the question. The younger boys’ relationship with their eldest brother was still strained - though he supposed Ollie was much more receptive to Darren’s attempts at reconciliation than Tadhg was. He was younger - he couldn’t feel abandoned by a man he never really knew, could he?
“You’d have to ask him, for details. But yes, based on what I know. They called him names too, said nasty things about him behind his back, same as me. Again, he can tell his stories better than I can.“
He swallowed down the rest of what he wanted to say, that sometimes it felt like all queer people were united not by their identity, but by the effects of daring to be born different. The venom spat from the mouths of their peers, the disgusted looks from adults, the hushed whispers promising change from family.
Almost as if on cue, Darren came in from the yard then. He wasn’t quite sure what it was he’d been doing out there, most likely messing about with the dogs. Like Shannon, Darren adored animals, and he loved to be out back with the two rambunctious dogs. (Privately, Alex occasionally found himself watching the young girl, transfixed by the similarities found between her and his boyfriend. Darren had imprinted on her heart from birth, and even six years of absence could not erase their similarities.)
Looking over at Darren alerted him to the fact that he and Ollie had in fact not been alone during their conversation. A small amount of heat spread across the back of his neck and he realized that the rest of the inhabitants of the room must’ve been listening in, as he couldn’t actually remember being able to hear Shannon and Edel’s conversation, given that it had probably ceased in favor of listening in on his.
Ollie took his chance then, turning to his eldest brother.
(The kid was quite the opportunist, Alex had learned, having been subjected to a delighted young boy chattering on about how he funded his LEGO empire with the money he earned from ratting on his older sister and her boyfriend.)
“Darren?”, Ollie called to the dark haired man.
“Yeah, Ols?”, Darren responded from where he was washing his hands, turning his head to fix his eyes on his tow-headed younger brother.
“When you were younger, were kids mean to you for liking boys?”
Wow, straight to the point, Alex thought to himself.
Darren clearly thought the same, and his normally chronically composed facade cracked a bit, physically jerking his head a bit and blinking hard.
“Uh.., yeah. They were. What’s this about?”
“He heard a word at school today. We were having a conversation about it, and he was wondering what you had to say about it.”
Alex swept in to explain to his boyfriend, putting weight into word in a way that he hoped would communicate which phrase it was he was referring to - or at least the nature of it.
He saw in Darren’s eyes that he did in fact pick up what he’d put down, and he turned his body towards Ollie as he dried his hands.
“What’s your question?”, he asked the boy next to Alex.
Ollie looked to him, thinking.
“They called you names? Like the f one?”
Darren nodded, placing the towel down.
“Yes. And they did other things. I had nail polish thrown at me once or twice. And some boys thought it was funny to grab my school bag from behind and yank me backwards so I’d fall over.”
As he spoke, he turned his head towards the ceiling and fidgeted with the silver watch on his right wrist.
Ollie's face screwed up, “Why was that funny? That’s mean.”
Darren shook his head, “They thought it was funny because they didn’t like me. They enjoyed thinking they’d hurt me.”
“Because you were different?”
“They thought I was weak. And they told me as much. At some point “gay” stops meaning “homosexual” and starts meaning “weak”, and you’ll feel that difference, that shift.”
Ollie looked into his brother’s deep blue eyes, seeing him more wholly than he ever had.
“Does it make you sad?”
Darren paused where he was leaning his hand against the counter top, looking up and taking a deep breath.
“It did, especially then. And sometimes still. But I’ve learned to live with it.”
He paused again.
“But… dwelling on the past won’t make time run backward,” he said. “It doesn’t change anything to always be thinking about it. It’s been years, and I’m not the person I was then. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not. It’s not my business.”
Alex had always admired how well-spoken Darren was, but never quite so much as he did then.
Ollie nodded, (God, had he picked that up from all the time he was spending with Alex?) and looked off to the side, processing.
Before he could get any more questions out, Darren’s phone rang.
He straightened, rapping the counter in front of Ollie twice as a goodbye and then walked out of the room by walking behind Alex, resting his hand on his shoulder for a split second as he rounded him.
Like some weird Pavlovian response, Ollie jumped down from his own stool, saying something about homework before running up the stairs to his bedroom.
Alex watched him go, and prayed to a God he hadn’t believed in since primary school that the world would be kinder to Oliver Lynch than it had been to his older siblings, that it would not strip him of that contagious joy that exuded from the young boy.