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“Zach?”
The door cracks just enough to let in a sliver of light from the hallway, his brother nothing more than a shadow as he pokes his head in the doorway sheepishly. “Hey,” Zach says softly, pushing up until he’s sitting, blinking to adjust to the low light. “Can’t sleep?”
Gray shakes his head, shifting from foot to foot nervously. “Can I… sleep in here?” he asks, after what feels like aeons of silence. He sounds ashamed, almost, like there’s something wrong with his request, and Zach feels a wash of pity for the kid.
“Yeah,” he nods. “Sure.” His hands push at the covers while he shuffles over to give Gray some room. There’s a soft click as the door closes behind Gray, the pad of his feet on the carpet, and then the mattress dips under what little there is to the boy. “Almost too small for the both of us,” Zach teases as he slips down on the bed, head sinking against the pillows.
“I’m not that big,” Gray pouts, and Zach laughs, tugging the blankets up as soon as he feels Gray’s arm bump against his own.
“Sure,” he agrees, nodding along like he believes it. “So, was it a nightmare?” He lifts his arm, rolling his shoulders before sighing, letting Gray curl into his side properly. His arm wraps firmly around the boy’s back, resting low near the waistband of his pyjama pants. Zach doesn’t need to see them to know they’re covered in little Iron Man’s. For the first month they were home, Gray had relied on the rest of them going into his room to get whatever he needed, not yet ready to find himself face to face with the things he was having nightmares about. Eventually, their dad had gone through and taken down anything that even remotely resembled that — that thing, stuffing them all into a box up in the attic.
Looking back, Zach is pretty sure a big part of why he did that had to do with how much he didn’t like that Gray had all but taken up permanent residence in Zach’s bedroom. His clothes in Zach’s drawers, his books on Zach’s bedside table, his body in Zach’s bed. While he never much cared about it (having an excuse to keep Gray close wasn’t something he was going to argue against, not when the thought of Gray being too far out of his sight for too long made a kind of panic swell up in his chest), their dad hadn’t made a secret that he did. Little remarks about how surely it wasn’t fair that Gray was constantly invading Zach’s space that made the boy shrink down in his seat with guilt (that Zach had eased away later, curled up in his bed with Gray tucked into his side, their pinkies locked together between them on his chest), his face twisting up with annoyance or frustration whenever they would descend the stairs in the morning, rumpled from sleep, Zach’s t-shirt like a dress on Gray’s small figure, Zach’s hand in Gray’s back to guide him to his seat.
He’d wanted so desperately to scream at him, tell him he was imagining things that weren’t there, but he’d never seen the point in doing so. His dad was stubborn — one of the many things they have in common, which would probably explain why they don’t get along very well — and didn’t like being told he was wrong about something, so Zach resolved to ignore it, and him, focusing his attention on his little brother instead.
Gray hums, pulling Zach’s attention back where it belongs (on him), and shifts a little, his nose bumping against Zach’s collarbone. “You died,” he whispers. He sounds exhausted, and suddenly Zach wonders how long the kid laid awake, staring at his ceiling, before finally venturing to his room for comfort. His arm squeezes tight around him, a sigh slipping loose.
“I’m alive,” he whispers in return, worried that talking any louder will scare the boy off. It won’t — he’s learning that nothing can scare Gray away from him, even when he’s so pissed off that his fist makes friends with the wall —, but the fear lingers anyway. “See?” He turns his free arm, the one not wrapped around Gray, wrist up, and a second later he feels cold fingers slide along his arm to rest against his pulse, pressing firmly after a beat.
A few seconds pass, and then Gray relaxes. His fingers curl around to cradle Zach’s wrist loosely. “Okay,” he says.
“Wanna talk about it?” Zach offers, turning his eyes to the ceiling as Gray snuggles closer, feeling his nose bump up against his collar again. Glow in the dark stars are still stuck to the ceiling from the previous owners. Zach has never cared about them enough to climb his way up to remove them. They remind him of Gray, in a way, though he couldn’t tell you how or why, and maybe that’s why he really keeps them up there.
Gray shifts. “No.” His hand is clumsy against Zach’s arm as it pushes up, curling behind his elbow and tugging insistently until Zach gets the hint and wraps it around him too, effectively trapping the boy in the circle of his arms. He feels Gray’s hands snake down to rest near Zach’s waist, fisting into his t-shirt while he shifts again to bury his face against his chest. “I miss you.”
It’s muffled, thanks to the way he’s smushed up against Zach’s shirt, but Zach deciphers it easily enough. “I’m right here, dude,” he murmurs, squeezing his arms around him for emphasis. “Not going anywhere,” he adds for good measure.
“College,” Gray mutters, and this time he turns his head to the side so the word doesn’t get lost in purple cotton.
“That’s still a year away. ‘Sides, you’re a genius, right? You’ll probably make it in before I do.” The joke has the desired effect, a giggle bubbling up that makes him smile, feeling a little smug about it.
Gray sighs quietly. His hand fidgets against Zach’s waist. “Once you move out, I’m never gonna see you.”
They’ve been avoiding this conversation. And they’ve been pretending that they’re not avoiding it, too. They have to have it at some point, Zach knows this, but he had been hoping that it wouldn’t be for another few months at least, so he can think up something to say, something to ease Gray’s worries as well as his own. It’s just like Gray to ignore the timeline Zach has made up in his head.
“Sure you will. Not like I’m going very far,” he says with a shrug.
He can feel Gray frowning, the way he tenses up against him. “I thought you wanted to go to California. That’s like…” he pauses, no doubt doing the maths in his head. “Over two thousand miles away.”
Zach shrugs again. “Yeah, but… I’ve been looking into different options, you know? There are schools here with art programs, and I’d be close to you,” he speaks slowly, quietly. He lets out a slow breath and closes his eyes, feeling a little dizzy in the low light. “It’s not like it’d be permanent. Just a few more years here, and then I can go… wherever, I guess, once we both graduate.”
Gray makes a quiet sound, one that feels heavy with guilt. “You know what dad would say, right? If you stayed.”
And Zach hates that, hates that Gray knows about how much their dad hates this, the way they’ve grown closer, the attachment they have now that’s the kind only born from almost dying together.
“I don’t care what dad says,” he says firmly. “It’s my decision, right? And if I want to stay in fuckin’ Wisconsin a few more years, there’s fuck-all he can do about it.”
They’re silent for a moment, and then Gray’s soft laugh breaks it.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Gray’s laugh tapers into nothing more than a giggle every couple of seconds. “Just realised that you totally love me.”
Zach sniffs. “No, I don’t.”
“You so do!” Gray insists, and his laugh is so sweet that Zach can’t help but groan loudly in defeat.
“You’re a brat. Go to sleep.”
The boy keeps laughing though, his body shaking with it as he turns his head in to try to muffle the sound against Zach’s chest, and try as he might, Zach can’t be annoyed by it. For months after the island, Gray had been quiet, hollowed out and barely a shadow of who he really was (loud and lively, oftentimes intensely so), and Zach doesn’t know what he’d do if Gray ever returned to that, so he’s learnt to be grateful whenever the kid is so happy he can hardly contain it. Where it used to make annoyance bubble under his skin, back before the island, when he would roll his eyes and slip his headphones over his ears, it now makes affection pulse in his chest, warm and welcome where he’d once have shoved it down into an unlabelled box, never to be opened again.
“Hey, Zach?”
Zach hums. “Mm?”
“I love you, too,” Gray whispers, like a secret. Zach supposes it is, kind of. One they’ve never shared before, even after what they’ve been through.
Emotion swirls in his chest, choking him, eyes stinging. He squeezes them closed as tight as he can, until it starts to ache. “I know,” he says softly, arms tightening some more around the boy’s small frame.
And he does. Gray’s always been an affectionate kid to those he cares about, pressing into their space and smiling toothily at them until they relented and let him smother them in hugs and kisses and God knows what else. Whether he’ll admit it or not, Zach was always, more often than not, the target of such treatment, and though he liked to pretend he was indifferent to the kid’s existence, he’d somehow always end up giving in quicker than anybody else, muttering complaints under his breath while shifting to accommodate whatever it was Gray wanted. There are other things too, of course, like the way Gray relaxes the moment Zach presses close to him, and the way his smiles get a little wider, eyes a little brighter, whenever he’s with Zach. Despite the way they act like it is, it isn’t really a secret. Actions have always spoken louder than words in their family, after all.
“Go to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”
This time, Gray nods, letting out a sleepy little hum as his body sinks against Zach’s, a warm, familiar weight that he won’t admit makes it easier for him to find sleep himself. Even still, he stays awake until Gray’s breathing evens out, until his body sinks boneless and heavy, until he’s sure the boy is sleeping soundly, safely. Only then does he allow himself to follow suit, sighing quietly and dropping a kiss to Gray’s unkempt curls before slipping into unconsciousness.