Chapter Text
Andrew doesn't love his girlfriend. He doesn't even like her, and he is aware that that's an awful thing to think about someone he's dated for the past five years.
It isn't her fault, exactly. There's nothing wrong with Julia, except for how she has no spine at all and how he has to push and push and push for her to speak her mind.
Of course, he'd never let her know he thinks of her like that. He'd never let anyone know most of the thoughts in his head.
But whenever he's at her place long enough, he leans against her bathroom counter, stares at his own lifeless eyes in the mirror, and contemplates suicide. The same old routine he's been following for years.
The cost-benefit analysis of killing himself is a thought exercise he returns to almost daily. He'd do it, too, if only it were that easy. He's pretty sure it would be a net positive to society if he just put himself out of his misery.
What's waiting for him if he doesn't? Another forty, sixty, eighty years of this shit... The very thought makes him sick to his stomach.
But it's complicated, because there's still something keeping him anchored to his miserable life against his will.
(It's not Julia, obviously. Sex is a nice distraction, another reason to delay his half-formed plans, and nothing more.)
His reason for living, day after day, when all he wants is to close his eyes and never have to open them again... Of course it's Ashley.
His precious little nightmare of a sister.
Ashley might be a pain in his ass, stubborn and angry and obsessive, and she might also be a total bitch, but she's his before she's anything else.
So it isn't really her fault. Even if it was, he'd forgive her for it, because he could and would and already has forgiven her for anything and everything.
She grates on him, of course, with her refusal to grow up. With how possessive she is of him, how jealous she is of Julia, how she has no tact at all and no interest in anything that doesn't immediately benefit her.
Their lives have been difficult and miserable, with few bright spots. Parents who couldn't be bothered to raise them, the awful accident that still sometimes haunts him in his sleep.
Through most of it, all they had was each other.
Andrew is the sort of person who can play nice. He'll put on his masks and spin his lies and follow the path laid out for him for years, trying to become someone ordinary and unremarkable.
Ashley isn't like that. She can't do it, or maybe it's just that she won't; in contrast to the layers upon layers of carefully crafted identity that serve to hide who and what he's always been, she's her rotten, misanthropic self from the surface to the core.
She's a high school dropout who can't do much besides cooking and cleaning, and whose only job prospects he'd sooner kill them both than let her pursue.
She's hopeless, really, helpless in the face of a world that she wasn't made for. Ashley was made for violence and mayhem, for inflicting maximum damage on unsuspecting victims.
So someone has to look after her, and he's the only person that's ever cared to.
It's always been like that, as long as he can remember. Even when he didn't want to take care of her, even when he resented her every breath, he did, because if he didn't then no one would.
She has some friends, but they're not exactly close, and he suspects she doesn't really want them to be.
The two of them are close, though. Closer than people expect, than they're comfortable with.
It's not healthy, but then that was never really in the cards. No shuffling the deck, you play the hand you're dealt.
It's simply a hazard of how their lives have gone. Misery loves company, or so they say, and the two of them have been huddled together to weather the storm of their existence longer than either of them can even remember.
That closeness is the source of most of his conflicts with Julia. It's the one subject she's consistently willing to press him on.
He is, of course, aware that it's unusual. But he weaves his web of lies, pretends he's willing to compromise—and he is, sort of, but not with Julia. Not even with Ashley, who he isn't entirely sure understands the concept.
No, his compromise is with himself.
As long as he draws the line between them over and over, every single day, things will be fine. As long as he dates Julia, he can pretend he wants to live a normal, simple life.
As long as he pretends that's what he wants, it's fine to carry on as they always have, telling himself it's only temporary.
Though things have been more difficult with Julia lately, ever since he made peace with Ashley.
That year of distance between them meant he'd thrown himself into things more to be away from her, meant she wasn't calling him away from his dates. Julia had seen it as a sign, as progress, and started not-so-subtly hinting that they should move out together.
He'd even started to consider it. That running away to somewhere as far from this city as possible was the key to finding peace.
(Though when he thought of that nebulous future, in some other city where no one knew his name or his face, Julia was rarely there at all.)
But while he'd been physically present with her, playing the part of the doting boyfriend and swallowing his irritation as he always had, his mind was always somewhere else.
Now things have relapsed more or less to how they were before. Even now, he's gathering his things to head home and tend to whatever probably-fake emergency Ashley has concocted this time.
"Do you really have to go...?"
"Someone has to," he says with a shrug. Remembering to feign resignation: he's supposed to think this is a burden, supposed to hate how she leans on him.
And maybe a part of him does, even now, but not like that. It's never enough that he'd actually leave her.
"..."
Julia's not happy, but she won't say anything, and he won't bother pretending he wants to hear it right now. He'll let her talk later, half-listening, but for now he has somewhere to be.
He leaves her on the curb with a kiss on the cheek, some sweet parting words, and a promise to make it up to her next time.
When he gets home and unlocks the door a short while later, the apartment is the same as it usually is at this hour: their parents are out, working late, and Ashley is sprawled over the couch staring at the TV.
She jolts at the sound of the door, turning toward him. "You came back."
She says it in a tone of voice he hasn't heard from her in far too long. Wonder. The kind of disbelief that isn't rolled in bitterness and fury.
"What happened?"
He studies her, how one hand is clutching her arm in a way that's strange for her.
She lifts it for a minute, wincing, and he sees the blood staining her sleeve now that he's looking—sees where it's been torn. "I was chopping vegetables and my hand slipped," she mutters.
He can't even remember the last time she'd needed him to patch her up. Some time in high school, if he had to guess, some ill-advised fight she'd gotten into with some person that didn't really matter.
"I'll take care of it," is what he says in response. Like a good brother.
He isn't, and he isn't sure he ever was, but he's trying. That has to count for something.
It's not how she usually talks when she's made up some excuse to drag him home. She threatens to hurt herself (and him, and others, in varying orders of importance and intensity) with some regularity, but to his knowledge she's never actually injured herself before now other than incidentally.
He considers all this as he drags her with him to the bathroom for the first aid kit.
"Your shirt's ruined," he observes. It's knit fabric, already unraveling, so he doesn't think he can stitch it back up for her like he usually would.
Ashley blinks up at him, eyes bright. "Should I take it off, Andy?"
"Don't," he groans—then sighs, deep and exasperated. Instead of starting another argument, he focuses in on her arm, prying her hand away to assess the damage more closely. "I'm gonna have to cut the sleeve up to get at it."
Ashley pouts. "But I like this shirt! Can't you just fix it?"
"No, the tear's too complicated to fix."
She's still pouting up at him, making a face he's all too familiar with. Still, a year out of practice, it only takes him a few moments to cave.
"...We'll get you a new one, promise."
As they make vague plans to go shopping, he starts cutting the sleeve, then peels it away to reveal the damage.
The cut isn't that bad, at least: the slice is long and bloody, stretching along most of her forearm, but it's shallow. The stains on her sleeve made it look worse than it was, and the bleeding has mostly stopped on its own.
He sets himself to the task of cleaning it, and the more difficult task of ignoring Ashley's hisses and curses and protests.
"You have to be careful with knives," he lectures her, voice soft but lacking in sympathy. She's been cooking for years, she's not some child playing with the stove for the first time.
With her injury disinfected, he covers it with a strip of gauze, tapes it down, and gently wipes the remaining blood from her arm and her hand. She doesn't protest this time, just watches him curiously.
Once he's done cleaning his own hands, he brings one up to rest on her cheek.
"Ashley," he says. "This was an accident, wasn't it?"
"Of fucking course it was! What the hell are you getting at?"
He winces at how instantly the fire and fury returns to her voice. "You're my little sister," he tells her, tilting her head up to look her in the eyes. "I'm allowed to worry about you. It's my job to worry."
"I thought you worked in accounting."
On another day, he might play along, but the vision of her lifeless body—of her leaving him—that's been haunting him since the idea first struck won't allow him to.
"Very funny, Ashley. No, I'm serious."
There's a pause, one where her bright eyes are cast down to the floor, her expression dark and unreadable. "If I said it was on purpose, then would you stay? Would that work?"
It was for sure an accident, then. She wouldn't gamble on something like that, or at least he's pretty sure she wouldn't—Ashley isn't like him with his cigarettes or Julia with her pocket knife, she doesn't go looking for pain and suffering.
"Don't even go there," he warns, low and dangerous. Before those ideas have the chance to settle into her head.
She scoffs. "Why not? It's worked for your wrist-cutting slut so far."
Ashley has always been frustratingly consistent. She wants him next to her, wants him to stay, and she'll do anything she's decided is necessary to keep him there. He doesn't mind the first part so much. After all, he's not going anywhere. Not really, not for long, and on some level he's done trying to deny that fact to himself if nothing else.
What drives him crazy is that nothing is ever enough to convince her of it.
"I really didn't mean to," she says when he doesn't answer right away. "I didn't do anything wrong, Andy..."
"Not my name." Despite his words, and the knowledge that she'd act exactly the same even if she had, he gathers her into his arms. "Accidents happen, but I can't always be here fix it for you."
She presses herself against him the way she always does, like the physical contact will somehow fix every problem she's ever had. "Why not?"
Andrew sighs into her hair. He really doesn't want to get into another retread of this specific argument. Especially not now, when he's starting to ask himself the same question. "Let's just go to bed."
"I don't want to."
"Too bad." She's small and light, easy to carry—he's tempted to throw her over his shoulder, but still worried about aggravating the cut on her arm.
"Put me down, asshole!"
In contrast to the delicate way he's carrying her like a princess, he smirks down at her. "Don't want to."
She curses at him as he drops her unceremoniously onto her bed. He doesn't bother telling her to make space, just nudges her out of the way as he joins her.
Ashley watches him, suspicious. "Is this a trick?"
Christ. This girl doesn't trust anything, does she?
But she doesn't stop him when he pulls her into his arms again, cuddling like they always have to fit together in one of the too-small beds they've had since they were kids. "Why would I be trying to trick you?"
"I don't know," she says, something quiet and helpless in her voice that feels like being pierced through the heart with something sharp. "It's different..."
"Different how?"
"...It just is," she says, and it's not the whole answer, certainly not the truth, but he lets it go.
They fall asleep like that, bodies pressed together and curled around one another. The tension between them isn't settled in the least, but for the first time in a long time the rest that finds them is peaceful.