Super Special Ep: Show and Tell (Part I)
This episode is part of a larger story, Soft Touch. If you haven’t yet, you can go back and read it from the beginning right here.
Aiden walks alone through the quiet, moonlit park. He’s going slow, taking his time. Regardless, his terrified heartbeat is hammering in his ears like he’s at a full sprint.
It’s getting late, and the people who respect the park’s hours of operation left a while ago. Ralph and Noah should be the only ones here besides Aiden. Somewhere out there, they’re waiting for him. Neither of them texted Aiden back, but they only would’ve done that if they couldn’t make it. Apparently the last-minute notice wasn’t a problem. Aiden’s mounting anxiety made him put off sending the text for some time.
If he wants to say nothing about what happened last night, the rescue that Noah and Ralph ended up a part of - they’ll let him do that. They’ve made that much perfectly clear.
But Aiden doesn’t want to put this off any longer. He’s determined to do it tonight.
He makes his way up the slope of the forested hill, crisscrossing through rustling trees. The branches are heavy with spring growth, bursting with vivid, dark green flurries of leaves and pine needles. Everything is silvered with moonlight.
The night air is cool and clear, sweetened by the soft rainfall from earlier. Aiden draws long breaths of it, as best he can through the tight knot in his chest. His thumb is tapping very fast on the strap of the backpack he has slung over one shoulder.
They’re your brothers, he says to himself, for the millionth time. Trying to reason with his wildly-beating heart. You’ve always wanted to tell them. That’s the fact, even if you’re fucking terrified right now.
He winces at this last, new addition to the thought he’s had on loop. He’d subconsciously hoped that if he left the fear mostly unacknowledged, that might help. There’s that strategy out the window. Consider it acknowledged.
Aiden takes another sorry attempt at a long, deep breath. His body is twitching every now and then with the anxious energy he’s trying to keep down.
He cuts off of the marked path, steps onto the grass, and heads for the shortcut - then snaps to a stop. Out of nowhere, his mom just loomed up in his memory like a ghost. Leaning down towards him, taking a breath to tell him what people inevitably do when they get a hold of this secret.
Aiden gives his head a hard shake, staggering back from the memory before his mom can open her mouth. He desperately, instinctively flings his mind as far as it can go in the opposite direction.
His memory takes those frantic instructions and lands him right in Jamie’s arms. Back in the lingering, encouraging kiss he put on Aiden’s mouth before Aiden left tonight. His gentle fingers pressed to Aiden’s cheeks, smelling of wild mint and soft earth. His sweet, warm, amber eyes looked perfectly calm, even though he knew exactly what Aiden was setting out to do.
That means everything to Aiden, because Jamie is his true north. Aiden can always find the right way, the right path to follow, from Jamie. The right way to come back home, too.
Aiden absorbs the breath-giving reassurance of that lingering kiss all over again, listening to Jamie as he does it. His note is peaceful, bright, in song. No doubt about it. Jamie isn’t worried.
That’s enough for Aiden. Enough to keep him putting one foot in front of the other. For now, at least.
Aiden sets off through the quiet of the park again. He lets his mind drift to different, older memories. Him and Ralph and Noah at this park, clustered close together on the rock ledge. This place is full of the past, for them.
The faraway echo of childish laughter from long ago drifts out from the walls of pine trees around Aiden. Followed by stupid, drunken, teenaged laughter, mixed with a lot of shouting. Then more recent laughter, deeper and calmer. Sometimes with Nik’s little baby laughter wound into it, if Noah brought her.
Aiden closes his eyes for a second. Everything will be okay.
He breaks out of the treeline wearing a distant smile, and catches sight of the rock ledge just in time to see Noah throw a punch at Ralph. Ralph ducks underneath it, then ducks again as Noah tries to catch him off-guard with a very fast follow-up punch.
They’re weaving around the rock lodge as they brawl, which makes it difficult to track what’s happening, but the general situation seems to be Noah on the wild, random attack, and Ralph calmly, casually dodging.
Ralph ducks his head again as Noah swings out an arm and tries to catch him around his neck with it. He comes so close this time that his arm swipes the top of Ralph’s head, ruffles his blonde hair. Ralph has to drop low and spin on his heel to get out of the way.
“Oh, shit! That one was close!” Ralph lets out a laugh as he straightens up, grinning widely, out of breath. He starts walking backwards, throws his arms wide, and makes a beckoning gesture with both hands at Noah. “Keep it up, Noosh, I might actually have to start trying.”
“Fuck off, dude!” Noah laughs. He’s on the advance, darting around like an electrical cord with sparks at the end, gone haywire. “Saying you’re not trying, when I can see you sweating!”
Aiden stands there in half-exasperated, half-affectionate silence for a long moment, watching his brothers play-fighting on the ledge. Now they’re both trying to kick each other, although they’re both getting in a lot more swearing than actual blows.
Noah suddenly drops low, moving like a blur. He lunges forward beneath Ralph’s arm and tackles him around his stomach. Ralph lets out a sharp, startled oof as they both go down to the ground, rolling away behind the rock ledge. They fall out of sight, but Aiden hears the sound of muffled thuds and shouting, even from where he’s standing.
He silently crosses to the rock ledge, loops around behind it, and stops in front of Ralph and Noah. They’ve both rolled back up onto their feet. Noah is swinging again, while Ralph swiftly leans back or drops down to avoid the punches he throws.
“What are you two dipshits doing?” Aiden sighs, in a voice like the kindergarten teacher at the end of a very long school day.
“Yo, Aiden’s here!” Noah says brightly, without taking his eyes off of Ralph.
“Noah’s still got some fire leftover from the fight in the woods last night.” Ralph neatly dodges another punch from Noah, then swats away the follow-up one. “I’m just letting him get it out of his system.”
“Mhm, yeah,” Aiden says, watching with fond eyes. He hasn’t seen Ralph and Noah throw a playful swing at each other since Ralph threw the not-so-playful one at Noah. Looks like the two of them have gotten past that, now. “Should’ve guessed.”
“Poor unfortunate clown only has me to fight against, though,” Ralph sighs, as if in deep sympathy with Noah. “It’s not fair to him, to be hones- ow! Fuck you, Noosh! That was a dirty shot!”
“Hey, you left yourself wide open, man! Be glad I was nice and didn’t throw a real punch, ‘cause I could’ve landed it-”
This time Ralph tackles Noah to the ground, so that Noah’s words cut off in a wheezing, forced-out exhale. Aiden stares straight ahead at nothing and lets out a weary sigh as Noah goes down, one leg with one muddy GI boot swinging up into the air.
Aiden waits until Ralph and Noah roll to a stop near his feet, then sets his backpack aside and reaches down into the fray. He gets both of his brothers by the collars of their jackets - taking them more or less by the scruff of the neck like two misbehaving puppies - and drags them back to their feet. They instantly burst into sputters of protest, panting too hard for their words to be intelligible.
“Break it up and sit down,” Aiden cuts in firmly, his deep voice cutting through even at its usual quiet volume. He sets Noah down on his usual place on the rock ledge, and Ralph in his. “Or I’ll slap the hell out of both of you, how about that?”
Ralph and Noah both stop resisting instantly. They drop down to sit down on the ledge in tandem, and in cooperative silence.
“That’s what I thought,” Aiden laughs, dropping to sit between them.
His backpack is starting to slide down the hill. He bends forward to get it, and hears the smack of someone seizing the opportunity to land one last slap behind his back, followed by an indignant scuffle as someone else tries to strike back.
Aiden knows them well enough to guess who did what, so when he straightens up he digs his elbow into Ralph’s ribs. Ralph lets out a sharp little yelp of surprise and pain, then a sheepish laugh. He knows exactly what that was for. Noah shoots a smirky, haha, sucker, you got caught kind of grin at Ralph, leaning back on his palms in the grass.
“Have we had enough?” Aiden asks, catching Ralph’s eye. “Someone could get hurt. Case in point: Ralph, your ribs.”
“No fair, man.” Ralph runs a hand over his side, trying to make a wounded face at Aiden. “You weren’t in the game, before.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
He blinks in surprise as both Ralph and Noah look at him happily, like - yeah, we know.
“Did you get the sandwiches from the deli?” Noah lets his inky hair out from the bun he had it in, which was starting to come undone, then looks over at Aiden again. “Think it was your turn to get them, right?”
Aiden hesitates for a moment, holding on tight to the strap of his backpack. Realizing that he has no way to explain.
He spent hours making all of the food that’s in his backpack. Carefully chose each thing he made, cooked it with loving, painstaking attention to detail, walked here wrapped in the warm smell of the hot food - all without thinking about why he was doing it. It just seemed like the right thing to do, at the time.
All of a sudden Aiden feels incredibly stupid. He’s all the way embarrassed about the situation. What are Ralph and Noah gonna think about him suddenly doing all this, apparently for no reason?
Aiden weighs the idea of saying he forgot to go to the deli, and that they should all just go there together now. He could sneakily throw out what he brought before it can raise any questions that he’s just discovered he has no answers to.
But he’s already let the silence go too long, and he thinks maybe Noah and Ralph can already smell the food he did bring, so - probably be a weirder thing to try and backtrack now.
“I, um,” Aiden answers slowly, suffering inside, “I actually made some stuff for you guys.”
He unzips his backpack, letting out a waft of air with a rich, spicy scent to it. Ralph and Noah both take a deep breath of it, leaning in closer with curious eyes.
Aiden takes out the warm, carefully wrapped packages, then starts handing them over to Noah and Ralph. Giving specific ones to each of them, trying to hide the shamefaced expression probably showing in his eyes.
“Noosh, that’s for you. This one, too-”
“These kind of look like spring rolls,” Noah observes, having already torn one of the packages open.
“They’re actually full of feta, fried up in pastry dough called yufka.”
“Oh, yes,” Noah sighs blissfully, taking a bite of the crisp, crunchy pastry, revealing the melty cheese inside. “Holy shit.”
“Ralph, those are Sanbuseh,” Aiden rushes to explain, as Ralph unwraps one of his packages and looks down at the warm, flaky pastries within, lightly fried to a golden color. “They’re - I don’t know if you’ll like it, but it has a potato filling with-”
He breaks off, because Ralph has already taken a huge bite.
“Oh, man,” he groans happily. “What the fuck, Aiden? Why haven’t you been cooking stuff for us this whole time? Noah, let me try one of your things, too.”
“Fine, but I wanna try some sambuca.”
“Sanbuseh, dude,” Aiden laughs.
Noah blinks at him, confused. “Isn’t that what I said?”
Aiden sits back for a second. Smiling to himself, reaching around to fidget with the brim of his snapback, flooded with relief. He gives himself a second to catch his breath before he takes out the food he made for himself. Ralph pulls a sharp little combat knife from somewhere in his clothes, then cuts up the food so they can share it.
Aiden watches the different foods get passed around. He chose everything he cooked specifically for each one of them, but here they are sharing everything.
“Hey,” he says slowly, glancing between Ralph and Noah. “Thanks for helping me out, with the whole thing in the woods. Appreciate it.”
“Sure, man.” Noah swats Aiden’s shoulder, then starts tearing into the next package of food. “You know you can always trust us.”
“That’s right, he knows.” Ralph glances sidelong at Aiden, a knowing grin flickering on his face. “Or he wouldn’t have admitted that Magic Mike XXL is one of his favorite movies. Out loud. To me.”
Aiden instantly lets out an agonized groan, shoving Ralph’s shoulder. “For fuck’s sake, dude! This is why I need to think before I talk!”
“Wait, Magic Mike XXL?” Noah laughs, looking at Aiden with startled grey eyes. “Really, man? That’s one of your favorite movies?”
“I never should’ve told you that, Ralph! And Noah, it’s not for the reason you think, or it’s - only partially - it’s honestly a good movie, alright? There’s actually a bi character, who-”
“Yeah, sure,” Noah cuts in, grinning widely. “It’s about all that, huh?”
“Totally.” Ralph nods at Aiden with a gentle, indulgent smile on his face. “That’s it, yeah. We believe you.”
Aiden closes his eyes, lets out a heavy sigh. “Losing the will to live, boys, not gonna lie.”
“Aiden, if you want to see shirtless dudes, we can find some movie-middleground,” Noah says, licking some sauce off of his fingers. “We should just watch 300.”
“No,” Aiden says firmly. “Nope, no. I fucking refuse, man. Never again.”
“What?” Noah’s pierced eyebrows fly up. “Why’s that?”
Aiden just stares at Noah, so Ralph leans around him to answer. “He’s Persian, yo.”
“Um, yeah? I know that.”
“But you can’t figure out why he didn’t really like 300?”
“I don’t…” Noah’s eyebrows slowly draw together and drop low in confusion. “Who are the Persians in that movie? I wasn’t really paying attention to the plot. S’about the fighting, right? You can fast-forward all the other stuff. Get right to the badass brawling!”
He pretends to aim at something with a feta roll, then pretends to give it a pump, then pulls an invisible trigger.
Aiden lets out a startled laugh. “What is that supposed to be, Noosh? A 12 gauge?”
“Yeah, dude, exactly!”
“Um…” Ralph stares at Noah incredulously. “I don’t remember anyone having a pump-action shotgun in the movie 300, man.”
“No?” Noah pauses, then narrows his eyes thoughtfully. “I might be getting the plot from the movie mixed up with the video game I was playing right after. Me and Jamie were passing a blunt. He was mad that I made him watch 300, that much I remember. And like I said, I wasn’t paying too much attention to the plot, so - no shotgun, then?”
“Oh, my god,” Aiden groan-laughs, as Ralph cracks a big grin.
“Think you want a battle spear,” he tells Noah.
Noah aims the feta roll again, then throws it like a javelin, sending it soaring into the air. Ralph and Aiden draw back in surprise, but no one looks more surprised than Noah, who clearly didn’t mean to actually throw it.
“Shit!” he shouts, and dives after the feta roll, trying to snag it before it can hit the ground.
He crashes forward, arms flailing wildly in the approximate direction of the feta roll, then slides almost ten feet down the hill. Flat on his stomach on the wet grass, shouting, trying to grab onto something to stop himself. Aiden closes his eyes, and Ralph slumps into him, both of them shaking with silent laughter.
“But I got the feta roll, though!”
“Noosh, are you kidding me? Don’t fucking eat that!”
Noah comes back up the hill, panting and laughing. And before Aiden knows it, things have fallen into their warm, comfortable, familiar rhythm.
He, Ralph, and Noah eat their food, talking and arguing and laughing. Tycho, who Aiden hadn’t spotted asleep in the shadows at the edge of the ledge, shakes herself off and drowsily stumbles over to nose through what remains in the food packaging. Noah pulls out a bottle of bubbles he’d been using to entertain Nikita and blows some out over the park. Ralph glares darkly at him when a well-aimed bubble kisses the tip of his nose and breaks gently against it.
Aiden laughs with Noah about it. He’s doing a lot of laughing tonight, just like Ralph and Noah are.
But he keeps running a nervous hand over his stubble, which has filled in all the way to a short, close beard after three days in a row of forgetting to shave. He laces his fingers together between his knees and stares out at the dark sweep of the park.
The sky overhead is deep velvet blackness, but flooded with stars. The starlight hangs like glowing powder in the air, misting the tops of the trees in soft, shifting veils of dusky white. Below, things are darker. The playground at the bottom of the hill only has a few lights, but it makes a little splash of gold against the night.
Aiden’s eyes wander over everything, not really seeing anything. The tangled knot in his chest keeps slowly easing up, then suddenly snapping tight and constrictive again. More and more as the night goes on, inevitably drawing him closer to what he wants to do. What he wants to say.
Aiden has been fighting hard with himself over this for a long, long time. During that time, he’s wondered a lot about how much Ralph and Noah know. How much they’ve noticed. The fact that they’d never brought it up led Aiden to assume they hadn’t noticed much.
He never guessed the true reason why Ralph and Noah have never said a word to him about it. That it was because they were waiting for him to come to them. At some point they must have talked about it with each other, and agreed that they would only ever open this topic on Aiden’s say-so.
They’d held good to that for well over a decade, now. Feels good, knowing that. Makes Aiden feel secure, putting the truth in their hands.
And he wants to do exactly that. Tonight. It’s time.
Aiden finally has both of his brothers back. He’s not here with the two strangers he met when he first came back to Ketterbridge. There’s evidence of that everywhere Aiden turns, but even if all he had to go on was a glance into their eyes, he would know.
Ralph still has that sharp, vigilant, hawklike look to his grey-green eyes. But now the quiet, subtle warmth beneath them, too. That changes everything.
Noah, whose eyes were like gunmetal when he was closed off and wired up, has that serene, silvery glow to them now. Like the grey-blue glimmer of icy snowpack at dawn.
Aiden’s brothers. Not a doubt in his mind. And Aiden knows his brothers.
Even during the moments when he, Ralph, and Noah were all furious with each other back in high school, all it ever took was one wrong word from some asshole - spoken against any single one of them - and they would instantly mobilize against the newfound common enemy. Pull together in seconds, be at each other’s backs again.
Ralph could have been picking on Noah right at that moment. It wouldn't matter. If someone else called Noah stupid, Ralph would whip around faster than lightning, with a glare that could strafe a person better than a machine gun. Aiden would be right behind him, or maybe a step or two ahead of him.
There was a time in high school when some upperclassman got annoyed enough with Ralph that he called him a gutter rat. Ralph went for him first, but he wasn’t the first one to get there. The ensuing two minutes got Aiden and Noah suspended from school for two weeks.
And Aiden knows full well where that permanent bump in the bridge of Ralph’s nose came from. He took a bone-breaker hit that was meant for Noah.
At the end of things, the three of them were always on each other’s side. And after what Ralph said last night… Aiden is letting himself hope that they won’t see him any differently once they know the truth. Just the way they’ve always seen him.
They would never use the truth against him. He’s not worried about that in the slightest. It would never even occur to Noah to do anything like that. It would occur to Ralph, but that doesn’t make a difference. Ralph already passed on the one time when Aiden thinks he was probably the most tempted. The time when he threw the punch - the real, not-joking punch - to try to stop Aiden from leaving Ketterbridge. Wouldn’t that have been the exact right time for Ralph to pull that card, if he ever planned to do it?
But he didn’t. Maybe because he knows the feeling all too well.
“I don’t give a shit about what people think,” he’d said to Aiden once, back in high school. Right after word got around that he came from Scinsci. “I’m not fucking ashamed of where I come from. It’s only that people are way too fucking ready to use anything against you, you know? Even shit you can’t change.”
Aiden never saw Ralph cry in high school, but sometimes, very rarely, there were tears in his voice. That was one of those times.
On the night when Aiden left Ketterbridge, Ralph must’ve understood that the punch would have been much less painful than the alternative. That was the path he chose, even though he was angrier with Aiden than he had ever been in his life before that moment.
Aiden closes his eyes gratefully for a moment. My brothers.
The trust and faith the three of them have in each other is silent, but it runs deeper than Aiden could concretely express to anyone. Unfaltering. They always come through for each other when all is said and done. Even under the heaviest pressure to break apart. Even when the invisible thread keeping them together is pulled tight enough to snap. Even if sometimes it takes upwards of eight years.
That’s the final obstacle Aiden is trying to find his way around. The one remaining reason he doesn’t want to tell Ralph and Noah the truth. They’ll be part of his Guardian rescues, whenever they can help. As soon as he tells them, that’s it. They’ll come through for him, whether he wants them to or not. He knows that. Because if the situation was turned around, he would do the same thing for either of them.
But they don’t know what it’s like.
Aiden knows the gut-wrenching feeling of knowing that someone out there needs you, and that you’re lost, or not ready, or too slow. The helpless terror of going in with no hint of what to expect. Knowing that if you fuck up, that could be it. Fatal consequences. The outcome could shatter you, and you might wind up alone in your bed, crying your eyes out over a life lost.
How is he supposed to warn Ralph and Noah about that?
If you’re like me, you’ll feel this sharp, raw absence. A new hollow place in your chest. The empty space where someone should be, even though you never knew, never met the person. Might be they come to see you in your nightmares. Look at you with accusing, heartbroken eyes. And you’ll know that no excuse is good enough. Not for them or for you.
Aiden closes his eyes and swallows hard, his jaw locking up.
He doesn’t want Ralph and Noah to experience any of that shit. It’s the opposite of what he wants. For them, he wants to be one small corner of the world where they can always go to be safe. To be sheltered and protected from everything. The last thing he wants to do is lead them out onto the battlefield himself.
But Jamie is right. Ralph and Noah are grown men now. They can make their own choices, they could help Aiden save some people, and… he just doesn’t want to hide this from them any longer. He never wanted to in the first place.
He thinks it’s time. He thinks he’s ready. He thinks they are, too. Doesn’t make it any less scary, but it’s the fact.
Aiden slowly opens his eyes. Finds them on Noah’s wedding ring, looped around his tattooed finger, picking up the moonlight. Aiden looks at it for a long moment, then turns his head to look at Ralph. Stares silently at the woven leather bands around his wrist.
He thinks about the things he’s never lost from his heart, even after eight years of radio silence.
Ralph is flat on his back on the grass, smoking slowly, his sage-colored eyes on the dark night sky overhead. Tycho is passed out in a heap at his side, her nose smushed against his faded black jeans. A little mound of white and silver fur, with one crooked ear sticking up.
Ralph lays very still. Slow-moving shadows from the nearby trees drip down onto him and glide over his face. Aiden’s eyes track the glowing red cherry of the cigarette for a moment before they flit back to Noah.
Noah is sitting up, swinging one knee slightly from side to side. His foot is doing a lazy bounce, his fingers messing with his lip piercing. He switched it from a ring to a stud, recently. Changed out some of the many rings in his ears for studs, too. The ones he put in kind of look like the ones he used to wear in high school, back when there was only one piercing in each ear.
There’s a new tear in his faded charcoal Everlast t-shirt. Aiden stares at it for a second, then bites back a laugh when he realizes from the grass stains that it was a result of the feta roll incident. He shakes his head, full of warm affection, thinking about how Noah doesn’t even need to say anything to make him laugh.
Tell him, some voice in Aiden’s heart says quietly. Tell both of them.
Aiden hastily drops his gaze to his Timbs, plucks nervously at his laces.
Noah is leaning back to look at Ralph, gesturing with one hand - saying something. Aiden realizes with a jolt that he hasn’t heard anything for a while. Ralph and Noah are used to him lapsing into long silences, so they haven’t noticed.
He sits up more, fidgeting with a strand of hair escaping from his snapback. He draws in some long breaths, trying to calm the interior noise. It got louder in his head while he was lost in his thoughts, not bothering to keep the volume down.
Ralph is talking when Aiden gets it back under control.
“You look like you’ve finally kicked the rest of the battle-high from the fight, Noosh. About ready to settle the hell down?”
“Nah, man.” Noah looks at Ralph with a diabolical gleam in his eye, thumps a fist into his own chest. “Never lose all your fight, right? Not completely. That’s my policy.”
Ralph turns his face away, blows some smoke up at the sky.
“Shit, don’t I know it,” he answers, his voice growing a little quieter.
Hearing an opening, Aiden looks up suddenly, glancing over at Noah. He can feel that his face is going pale, and his mouth is all dry when he opens it to speak.
“Speaking of that fight,” he says, before he can talk himself out of it, “When the fuck did you two learn how to execute a pincer attack? I never showed you how to do that.”
Ralph flashes Aiden a grin. “We’ve had time to refine your methods, A. Surprised you never did the same.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have helped if I’d learned that one. That’s a two-man attack, so.”
Ralph pauses, glances over at him curiously, then quickly looks away again. Noah had been lifting his root beer to his mouth, but he stops, steals a fast look at Ralph.
Neither of them says anything.
Aiden hesitates for a long, long moment. When he finally unlocks his jaw and opens his mouth, his quiet words burst out all in a rush, to the point that he starts stumbling over them.
“Before, I would’ve been alone. Jamie, Luca and Roger, you guys, none of you would’ve been there to help. It would’ve been just me. I would’ve had to go get him on my own. I never used to ask anybody for help, until I - until Jamie. After I got back to Ketterbridge.”
He stops, having run out of breath.
Ralph and Noah both stare at him in frozen, wide-eyed silence for a moment, then look sharply at each other.
Ralph slowly sits up and rests his elbows on his knees. Noah stops bouncing his foot, holds perfectly still. He and Ralph look at Aiden with searching eyes, suddenly silent. Both of them seem afraid to say anything.
Aiden keeps his gaze trained on the empty, half-lit playground at the bottom of the hill. He rehearsed this conversation in his head so many times, hoping it would eventually be so familiar that all he had to do was go through the well-practiced steps when the time actually came to have it.
He doesn’t know why he keeps doing that. It never works out that way. If anything, he’s panicking more, now. Holding perfectly still, but silently floundering, grasping helplessly at the things he meant to say as they scatter to the wind in the face of his rising anxiety, every carefully-chosen word he had lined up unraveling into fragments and going up in smoke - no no no no -
Gone.
Fuck.
Aiden tries to call back the broken pieces, anything he can. Comes up empty-handed. He takes a deep breath, with a hint of stressed-out jaggedness to it. Here he is winging it, once again. Goddamnit.
At least Jamie’s note is there for him, like it always is. He clings to it like a lifeline, pushing aside the frantic internal voice trying to remind him that there’s no going back from this, things will never be the same again, there’s no going back, no going back -
“Hated - I hated doing it alone,” Aiden stammers, staring down at the grass, then out at the trees. Anywhere except at Ralph and Noah. “Especially when I was a kid. But I can’t not go. If someone’s calling, I - I have to go. Have to at least try… so it’s - it means a lot that you guys helped me. But that’s also a big part of why I haven’t told you, all this time. I don’t want you holding the same things in your head that I do, I wanted to keep you two out of it, keep you safe… I mean, this shit was hard enough on me, I ended up drinking all the time just to, you know, to n-numb it all down… But - comes a time when y-you - you just don’t want to go on keeping things secret from the people who - to you, they’re, like - the - the most im… the - and I - I want…”
Aiden falters into appalled silence, wincing in horror.
He’s sharply aware of how terribly this is going, mortified over how badly he’s fucking it up, but also helpless to do anything about it. Panic has his nerves leaping around in his chest like lightning, jolts of electricity running up his veins. His straining, overworked heart is about to break under the pressure.
He tries his hardest not to look at Ralph and Noah, but both of them are leaning forward, leaning in towards him. He can feel their staring eyes on him. Neither of them says a word, and the silence goes on for too long.
“Aren’t - aren’t you guys gonna say anything?” Aiden finally blurts out, in a hoarse, desperate, suffocated voice.
No answer, so he takes in a shallow breath, then looks up at Noah and Ralph.
They’re both staring at him with enormous eyes, their mouths dropped open. The perfect picture of shock. Noah is holding onto the rock ledge so tightly that his tattoos look darker against his whitened knuckles. Ralph is frozen with one hand half-lifted to Aiden, like something stopped him in mid-movement.
It takes Aiden a second to grasp what happened, but he gets there. Even if he’s struggling like hell to say it out loud, some barrier within him must have finally, silently gone down.
Because there’s ice-blue, glowing light reflected in Ralph and Noah’s eyes. And there’s only one place it can be coming from.
Right in front of his brothers, Aiden got too worked up and let his magic get away from him. Let it show, right there in his eyes. It’s showing right now.
The realization staggers Aiden. Suddenly no breath he tries to take is reaching his lungs. It looks like Noah and Ralph are both having the same problem.
Aiden glances desperately back and forth between Ralph and Noah, blinking hard, anxiously kneading his thumb into his palm. Looking at them with pleading, begging eyes, for no reason he can make clear to himself. And they sit there frozen, staring back at him, shell-shocked.
Aren’t you guys gonna say anything? Aiden almost asks again, but he holds it back.
As much as he wishes it was the other way around, he’s the one who has something to say to them.
Ralph abruptly breaks the silence. His voice is raspy, stunned, slightly out of breath, and he’s speaking very slowly.
“Hey, A… you - you got something you want to get off your chest?”
The one single A catches some heartstring of Aiden’s and tugs it hard, instantly unleashing a full-blown flood of deep, white-hot fraternal fire in his chest. It sweeps upwards to his head, too, suffusing his mind, flowing over all the panicked thoughts in one gentle, comforting, molten wave. With those muffled down, he catches Jamie’s note again. Sweet peace pours through Aiden at the sound, counterbalancing everything else to a level he can almost cope with.
His gaze moves away from Ralph to look into Noah’s wide grey eyes. As he watches, Noah slowly lifts his tattooed hands to his face, and - without closing his mouth or changing his expression - rubs his eyes a few times, blinks hard, then stares at Aiden again. Like that might’ve put everything back to normal.
Aiden can’t believe it, but he nearly laughs. Even right now. The powerful feeling in his chest, in his head, in his heart - it doubles itself, burning twice as hot, running twice as deep.
Aiden takes a real, deep breath, then another.
“Yeah,” he hears himself answer. “I do.”
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