Work Text:
Lloyd was just finishing with the finishing details of the sketch he’d spent the last few hours on when he looks at the clock for the first time all afternoon.
4:55 p.m.
Shit.
He abandons his sketchbook and pencils to book it out of his room, down the hallway and into the kitchen.
He arrives in the kitchen and slips past his mum to rinse and start chopping up the carrots that had been left out on the bench.
Maybe if he gets all the vegetables ready then his mum wouldn’t notice he’s late?
“Okay, stop,” his mum says as she turns to face him, not even five minutes later. “You can’t come in here late and pretend that you haven’t done anything wrong. What were you even doing in there that’s more important than dinner?”
Lloyd is confused for a second.
He hasn’t done anything all day that she would consider ‘wrong’, so what is she talking about?
Oh.
Oh no.
At the same time he works it out, he quickly blurts out, “I didn’t mean to still be in my room after 4:30, I just lost track of time and—”
His mum cuts him off. “What were you doing in your room?” she repeats.
“I was— I was doing stuff,”
She would never accept him having been doing his own stuff as a good reason. And it’s summer break so he doesn’t have the excuse of schoolwork to fall back on this time.
“It doesn’t matter. Whatever you were doing isn’t more important than dinner. You know you’re supposed to be keeping better track of the time,”
But this is the first time in months that he hasn’t followed the rule.
His mum knows that. She does.
…He hopes that she does.
Either way, he has to fix this now before it blows up into full on yelling. He really doesn’t feel like being yelled at today.
“I do. Today’s the only day I haven’t been—”
His mum keeps going on, like he’s never said anything.
“You should know better, Lloyd. If you’re home in the afternoon, then it’s your duty to be here helping with dinner by 4:30. You know this. You’re almost an adult now, you can’t hide in your room and always expect dinner to be magically ready for you,”
Something he vaguely registers as annoyance bubbles to life within him.
He isn’t stupid or a child. He knows that dinner doesn’t just spawn readily made on the dining table.
He doesn’t ‘hide in his room’ either— he’s been in the kitchen well before 4:30 p.m. recently, even when he hadn’t been done with whatever he was been doing at the time.
His mum knows this, he thought she did.
So why is she talking like he’s some entitled brat who acts like a king?
But there’s nothing he can do now. If he argues with her, it’ll only end up with her actually yelling at him or him getting slapped, if he pushes it even further.
The world — or maybe just his perception of it — shifts abruptly to the left with the words that come out of his mum’s mouth.
Nothing has actually moved or changed but Lloyd feels strange, like he’s watching himself and his day through a hazy screen.
He doesn’t know why this is happening now, his mum hasn’t even started yelling, yet.
But she is still talking. Whatever she’s saying melts away into static that he is aware of but his brain refuses to sort into understandable sentences. It’s probably the same as what it had been the last time this happened,
He doesn’t fight it.
Why would he, when the alternative is listening to his mum go on and on about how he failed just now, when all he did was stay in his room for an extra fifteen minutes?
It’s always a bit disorientating when the haze appears at first. And, for as much as he’d like it to take him fully away from the present, it has only done that once. This isn’t a repeat of that time, this isn’t even half as bad as that day was. Instead, it settles into his brain just enough that he is still aware of what his body is doing without ever feeling like he is the one doing any of it.
The haze has always kept him safe when this happened before, so he embraces it this time too. Even if this time isn’t anywhere as bad as the other times that this sort of thing happened.
Lloyd drifts half-aware while he and his mum dinner together and while his body goes through his usual after dinner routine, until he finds himself sitting on his bed some time later.
He’s not sure what time it is but he remembers washing the dishes and heading toward the shower so it’s definitely later.
He tenses when his mum walks down the hallway. But she doesn’t stop at his door and just continues on towards her bedroom but that doesn’t let him relax. She’d calmed down by the time that they
By the time the world outside his window is entirely dark and the haze has faded just enough for him to be aware of things past his own brain again, Lloyd decides he can’t stay here any longer otherwise he’s going to go mad, whether from anger or stress or both he isn’t sure.
So he pulls on shoes and a hoodie — it might be 26° outside but he’s still not willing to be caught walking around outside in his pyjamas — and slips out of his bedroom and pads quietly down the hallway until he gets to the front door. Slowly, so that the old door doesn’t screech and give him away, Lloyd slips through it too and out into the common corridor.
The next thing he knows, he is standing in front of Nya and Kai’s door with fist raised to knock.
Just before it makes contact with the wood, Lloyd hesitates.
He didn’t look at the time and forgot to bring his phone with him but it feels late. It’s not polite to be disturbing his siblings friends this late in the evening; they’re probably busy with more important things than someone who couldn’t handle his mum being a bit annoyed with him.
Just as he’s about to turn around and go back home, the door opens.
“Lloyd?”
Kai’s standing there. That makes this even harder. His big brother friend is also in pyjamas and his hair is even more spiky than it usually is.
Did he wake him up? He must have.
He shouldn’t have come here. He doesn’t need to come here— he’s over-reacting. Nothing even actually happened tonight.
“Kai! Sorry, I didn’t realise how late it is. Didn’t mean to wake you. I’ll go now. Sorry. See you in class tomorrow,” the blond apologises.
“Come in. You’ve already walked all the way here, anyway,”
That’s Nya’s voice.
Kai is doomscrolling in bed instead of actually going to sleep when someone knocks on their front door.
It’s 1 a.m. Why would anyone be at their door now?
The first thing he notices, other than the dragon-patterned pants, is how spaced out Lloyd is when despite his attempts to seem normal.
Even in the half light from the dimmed hallway lights, he can see that Lloyd’s eyes are distant, and it sounds like he’s talking through a pipe as he apologises.
What is he even apologising for, anyway? Besides showing up on their doorstep at one in the morning, that is.
Something is wrong. Or something has happened. Kai’s not sure which one he wants it to be.
Either way, he has to do something to help Lloyd now. He can worry about what happened before he knocked on their door later.
The three of them settle on the Smiths’ old sofa.
“Everything okay with your mum?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine,”
“I meant how are things, really?” Kai asks again.
He shrugs. “It’s alright. Mum was just being mum,”
Lloyd expects them to accept that and drop it, neither do.
"It doesn’t seem fine,” Nya pushes.
“It is. Nothing even happened so it’s fine,” he says. “She was just…annoyed, at me, again,” he admits.
He hadn’t been planning on telling them about what had happened but in the end, he doesn’t have much choice in the matter.
The words tumble out of him whether he wants them to or not.
“Why would she say that?!” Lloyd snaps, interrupting his own rant. “And when I tried to tell her this isn’t a regular thing, she didn’t listen. She kept going on and on about how I failed and that I was lazy and selfish—”
It isn’t that his mum had been annoyed with him earlier that Lloyd’s upset about. But what has gotten to him is how she had repositioned what happened to be a major moral failing rather than a broken habit as it was and had tore into him for it.
He hopes he’s conveying all that to his siblings properly and doesn’t sound like an ungrateful, whiny brat.
Lloyd asks, saying it out loud for the first time since everything happened. “I’m overreacting, aren’t I?”
“Oh I am going to kill that woman,” Nya seethes instead of answering him, already moving to stand.
For the first time since all this happened, the blonde feels something other than numb detachment as the combination of horror—fear—surprise slams into him.
“Wait! No! Nya, don’t!” Lloyd scrambles. “It’s not bad enough for murder!”
Nya stops mid step.
“Relax. I’m not actually going to do it,,” she reassures him, all her previous anger gone in a moment. “Koko’s still your mum, even when she does shit like that,” she adds. “And if anyone in this family is going to jail, it’s going to be Kai,”
“Hey!”
Before anyone can say anything more, his sister turns on her heel and heads into the kitchen where, a moment later, he hears cabinet doors being opened.
“She’s not serious…is she?” Lloyd asks tentatively.
Kai shakes his head.
The sound of a kettle boiling trails in from the open doorway between the two rooms.
“Nya’s not going to do anything to your mum…probably,” he confirms. “Not before I do,” he adds a second later, quieter.
Lloyd would laugh if he could feel anything other than numb detachment and betrayal.
The middle Smith sibling comes back from the kitchen with two steaming mugs and a…punch box?
Before he can ask why she’s brought that, it’s already changed ownership.
Nya hands him one of the mugs.
“It’s green tea,” she tells him as he peers inside trying to work out what it is she’s made.
Any anger Lloyd is feeling earlier has evaporated into the steam from his tea.
He still feels off but he always feels like this for days after this sort of thing happens.
“You’re sleeping here tonight,” Kai decides when they’ve all finished their drinks.
Lloyd shakes his head.
“No, I can’t. I should get home and sleep a bit before school tomorrow,” he says. “I don’t want to impose more than I already have,”
“There’s nothing wrong with you being here, even if it’s 1 a.m.,” Kai tell him.
Lloyd isn’t sure what to say to that because it sounds like it should be wrong. An unplanned sleepover on a week night has to be crossing a line somewhere.
“We’d rather you sleep here than go back home and be alone tonight,” Nya explains.
“I’m not—” He cuts himself off, because he already knows they absolutely would keep going until he gave in. And also they are right, going home now would only mean lying awake and thinking until his alarm went off. “Okay,”
Later, lying on the Smiths’ sofa instead of his bed, while listening to the sound of early morning traffic speeding past instead of focusing on every sound that comes from the direction of his mum’s room, Lloyd falls asleep faster than he has in weeks. Faster than he would have had he been at home right now.
In the morning, the three of them have breakfast together, despite Lloyd’s protests they don’t need to give him any food and that he can eat at school.
Then the three of them walk to school together. Lloyd decidedly doesn’t think about his mum the whole time, who’s probably already at her early shift.
And when Lloyd gets home from school, the first thing he does is set an alarm for 4:25 p.m.
This isn’t the first time this kind of situation has happened, it won’t be the last either. And he has basically no way of predicting when they will happen or what they will be about. But if he has that alarm, there’s no way he’ll be late being out in the kitchen ever again.
He just needs to survive for another year until he moves out.