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The first sign that something’s wrong is a thin, scratchy wail, as though from a voice unused for years. Hero comes halfway awake and tries to disentangle reality from dreaming.
It’s very dark, but Hero can see Kel sleeping just next to him. He sits up, twists around, sees Aubrey, and breathes a sigh of relief. Next he looks to his right, over to—
Sunny’s duvet is abandoned against the wood panelling, thrown hastily aside. Hero’s heart rate starts to pick up.
He hears something else. Someone else. Basil’s voice. It’s so loud it can be heard from two rooms over.
“Everything’s okay, Sunny. It’s okay now—stop it, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” again and again, the tone all wrong for someone so gentle. Hero gets to his feet. Aubrey turns over and stares at him blearily.
“S’going on?” she asks.
“Not sure. Stay here.”
“M’kay.” She pushes herself up against the arm of the sofa and stretches her arms over her head. Despite the facade of casualness, her body is tense. They can both still hear Basil talking—screaming, really. The other voice has trailed off.
Apart from those currently present in the living room, there was only one other visitor in the house. With mounting trepidation, Hero approaches Basil’s bedroom door.
It’s closed, but not locked. He knocks first.
“Basil?”
A shaky gasp, then Basil’s voice falls silent as well.
“Basil, is Sunny in there with you?”
A noise like sobbing, which turns to coughing. Hero’s stomach drops.
“Basil, I’m coming in. Is that okay?”
No reply. Basil is retching too hard to speak. Sunny isn’t saying anything, isn’t even making a noise.
Hero opens the door.
The hospital waiting room is extremely white. It’s a refreshing change.
Hero stares at the wall, then the ceiling, then the floor, then his hands. He tries not to see the tiny specks of blood under his fingernails that he couldn’t quite wash out.
On one side of him, Aubrey is silent. Her hair covers her eyes and face. Her hands clench and unclench in the crumpled fabric of her skirt. She breathes steadily through her nose and otherwise keeps perfectly still.
On his other side, Kel sobs. He cries with a force of sadness that Hero didn’t know he contained. His entire frame shakes with every staggered breath, and his chair creaks along with it.
Hero should comfort him. Hero should comfort them both. Mari would.
But Mari is dead, and her beloved younger brother might be going to join her.
Hero keeps his eyes on his hands. He prays that this time, he did enough.
There are some moments that live in a person’s head. Life-changing, earth-shattering moments. A sibling’s birth, their weight in your arms. The brightest smile of someone beloved; that person’s death by their own hands.
And now this: a childhood friend’s body sprawled on the floor in a pool of his own blood.
Hero shouldn’t be able to move, shouldn’t be able to breathe, but finds his eyes travelling up to where Basil is knelt, a pair of bloodsoaked pruning shears under his fingers. His eyes are unearthly in the faint moonlight.
They stare at each other. Sunny’s blood pools further and further out; it gleams, perversely beautiful in the darkness.
“I… I helped him. I saved him,” Basil says.
Hero’s body moves before his mind does, throwing himself on the ground at Sunny’s head and pressing his hands to the ugly wound in his face. His face. His eye is—it’s—
“AUBREY!” he screams. “HELP!”
Sunny whimpers, the first sound he’s made since Hero opened the door. Hero’s heart leaps.
“Stay with me, Sunny, you’re okay, you’re fine, just stay awake, come on, come on—”
“Don’t,” says Basil. “Don’t save it, it’s killing him—”
The door slams open. Aubrey is pale, and goes paler still when she registers the scene in front of her.
Basil scrabbles for his shears against the damp ground. Hero knows it’s coming before he even moves.
“Aubrey—” he starts, terrified.
Basil’s lunge never makes it. Aubrey launches herself forward and knocks the shears from his hand, knocks his body onto the hard, wet floor. Her teeth are bared as Basil shrieks and struggles and tries to twist away from her.
“What are you doing?” he sobs. “Why are you helping it? Do you want him to die? Do you want him to leave?”
Hero looks back down at Sunny’s face, contorted in pain and terror. He can’t fix this. In his peripheral vision, Aubrey holds firm against Basil’s desperate escape attempts.
He presses down harder against Sunny’s eye. The blood just keeps coming; its metallic tang stings Hero’s nostrils. Hero thinks he remembers a line from a play that went like this, about how the blood kept on pouring out, how his hands will never be clean—
“Stay awake, Sunny, stay alive, please—”
Basil keeps screaming. Aubrey keeps holding. Hero keeps begging.
Sunny keeps bleeding.
Hero’s knees are still damp.
The hospital staff offered them all a change of clothes, of course—each of them individually refused it, god knows why. Hero did his best to wash the blood off his hands, but…
Hero’s jeans are covered in blood. He’s trying not to think about it. He’s trying not to think about how he and his little brother and little, resilient Aubrey tracked dried blood into the hospital waiting room on the soles of their shoes.
Kel’s sobbing has stopped, but his tears haven’t. Aubrey might calcify from how still she’s holding herself.
Hero can’t stay here.
“Hey, I’m.” He clears his throat. “I’m gonna try and get something from the vending machine. You guys want anything?”
There’s barely a response from the kids sitting next to him—which, to be fair, he expected.
“Alright,” he says. He stands up. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?”
His voice sounds hollow when it rings around the room. The kids still don’t react.
Hero takes even, measured steps to the waiting room door and past it down the corridor. He walks slowly and tries to remember everything he’s ever learned about keeping calm in a crisis. He’s the only one here to look after them, all of them.
He makes it two more corridors away before he sees a bathroom, and just like that, he knows that he’s about to vomit.
He barely makes it in time.
Sunny’s face is slowly losing colour. The sleeves of Hero’s sweater are slowly growing more and more damp.
Hero realises with perfect clarity that if he doesn’t get professional medical help soon, Sunny is going to die.
Kel is at the door now, clearly awoken by the ongoing screaming. Basil’s throat must be raw by now. Kel’s face is ashen as he takes everything in.
“Kel,” Hero says, voice trembling. “Call an ambulance.”
His brother doesn’t have to be told twice. He turns and sprints off down the hall.
“You’re doing great, Sunny,” Hero mumbles. “Just a little longer. I promise you’ll be okay. Just stay awake for me.”
Sunny’s eye—his remaining eye, Hero remembers with a lurch—flickers open for just a second. Basil is sobbing, still weakly pulling against Aubrey’s hold. Aubrey has tears dripping down her own face.
Sunny’s hand twitches. Hero distantly registers the blood under Sunny’s fingernails—the blood under his own fingernails.
He wrestles down the urge to scream—he doesn’t want to add to the situation, to Sunny’s confusion and fear right now. Sunny’s fingers are still weakly twitching against the ground, like he wants something to hold onto. Hero wants to cry.
“It’s okay, help is on the way, got it? You’re not allowed to—” Maybe it’s karma. Maybe it’s a second chance. He can’t let another person slip away—not while he can do something about it.
Kel skids back into the room and immediately moves to Hero’s side. His socks slip in the blood on the floor, which makes Hero feel liable to vomit. He’s meant to be becoming a doctor, but in this emergency he feels dizzy and anxious and sick with grief—
“They’re on their way,” Kel says. He presses something into the backs of Hero’s hands where they’re positioned against Sunny’s wound.
“I got it from the living room,” he says. When Hero manages to focus his eyes, he registers that ‘it’ is a thin woollen blanket. It’s not the best thing, it might not even be that clean, but better than nothing. Better than Hero’s hands.
As soon as Hero takes his hands away, though, he has to deal with the reality of the jagged gash in Sunny’s face. Kel gasps sharply, swears, and grabs one of Sunny’s hands. Hero swallows.
Although he kind of knew, he didn’t want to believe it before. Even so, Hero is now almost completely sure that if Sunny survives this, he will lose an eye. He’s the same age as Hero’s little brother—younger, even. He’s a fucking kid.
Basil has fallen silent. He looks exhausted. Now that he’s not a flurry of constant, terrified motion, Hero can see deep scratches on his face and arms.
He looks back at the blood under Sunny’s fingernails. His heart sinks even further. He presses the blanket as hard as he can against what used to be Sunny’s right eye, and waits for someone to save them.
The good thing about throwing up in the early hours of the morning, Hero muses, is that there isn’t much left in your stomach. His throat feels itchy and stings when he coughs to dislodge the last of the stomach acid.
He staggers to his feet. For a few seconds the cubicle sways and distorts around him. Hero thinks about the kids waiting for him just a few corridors away; he tries not to collapse.
He leaves the cubicle and splashes some water on his face. His face looks extremely tired in the grimy mirror, though he was sleeping surprisingly peacefully until he heard—
Hero leaves the bathroom and trails his hand along the wall of the corridor as he makes his way towards where he thinks a vending machine will be.
It had to have been Sunny. The noise that woke him must have come from Sunny’s mouth. When the shears went into his eye?
It’s just that—now he has the time to think about it, he can’t quite understand. Sunny’s eye had been—bile rises in Hero’s throat thinking about it, even now— destroyed. In the dark and then the beacons of the ambulance it had been difficult to see, but there had seemed to just be a void where it’d been. Nothing reflected the light. Nothing was there.
But that’s exactly what Hero just can’t get his head around; the amount of force, the calculated angle, the way the wound came in above the socket and out below by only an inch either way. Basil had to have been aiming for Sunny’s eye. He wanted it gone , and clearly those pruning shears were just the tool for the job.
Once back in bio class, Hero remembers, they dissected a sheep’s eye. It was slightly limp and sticky with age, but it’d taken a good few attempts with a scalpel to get into it to see the retina. It was tough, seemingly unbreakable, and then it had come open like a rotten fruit. There was fluid inside.
Hero thinks he might throw up again.
He just—he doesn’t understand why. Why Basil had gone directly for Sunny’s right eye, why that one wound had been so severe that the rest became trivial, why they’d been fighting in the first place. Why Sunny hadn’t been able to fight back, to push him away before the blade hit his eye.
Why Sunny had been hurting Basil as well.
Hero suddenly registers that he’s been staring at a half-stocked, very dusty vending machine for the past five minutes. He doesn’t think he has the appetite to eat even a candy bar, but he digs some small change out of his pocket and buys a bag of chips; maybe Kel or Aubrey’ll want them.
Kel and Aubrey… shit, he hasn’t been with them for at least ten minutes. There won’t be another stabbing in the trauma ward of a hospital, he knows that, but his heart rate trips over itself and drops into a dead sprint nonetheless. They need someone to be strong for them.
Basil too, though Hero still isn’t sure what he’s going to say when they’re allowed to see him.
And Sunny…
Sunny.
Hero has to believe Sunny’s alive. For Mari’s sake. For his brother and for Aubrey and even for Basil—for his own sake, as well. None of them can take another loss.
The corridor doesn’t seem to be swaying anymore, though, which is a good sign. Hero sets off back towards the waiting room, listens to the bag of chips crinkle as he walks, and does not, does not, does not think about Sunny’s eye.
Waiting for the ambulance is one of the longest experiences of Hero’s life.
He has no idea how long it’s been, because no one’s turned the lights on, because no one stomach the thought of seeing Sunny’s blood on the floor. It’s already stained Hero’s fingertips and one of Polly’s kindly proffered blankets.
Shit, Polly—one of them needs to call her. One of them needs to let her know what Basil’s done, how he’s probably going to be sectioned for this, if not prosecuted. If Sunny’s mom—fuck, Sunny’s mom, what is he even going to say to her—decides to press charges.
Sunny’s breathing is rapid. He looks terrified, nauseatingly so, like the world is about to come down around his ears and leave him stranded. It’s an especially unsettling look on his usually impassive face. Kel is still holding his hand, Hero is still stemming the blood flow, but Sunny doesn’t seem to know that either of them is even there.
Basil is lying still. Aubrey has him pinned, but it doesn’t even seem necessary anymore; Basil’s eyes look listless when Hero looks up to check on him. Like he’s completely detached from reality. Something’s finally come apart in his head, Hero thinks—he doesn’t want to think too deeply about it.
Something’s coming apart for Hero, too. Time distorts as they wait. It’s like he’s locked in place—he’s felt this way before, but this time is worse. Better? Sunny’s still alive. The ambulance is coming. Sunny’s still alive, Kel is holding his hand, Hero’s holding his head, and the blood continuing to pulse sluggishly is—
Sickening. But his heart is beating.
Kel and Aubrey are exactly where he left them, though Kel’s stopped crying quite so hard. Aubrey’s knuckles are white. Kel’s eyes are red.
“I got chips,” Hero says. Neither reacts. Of course they don’t.
“Hope you guys are feeling a little better,” Hero says, because it’s something to say. He thinks he sees Aubrey’s hands twitch, just slightly. Thinks he hears Kel sniffle. It’s better than nothing.
He sits back down and the wait resumes.
Waiting. He’d been waiting. He’d wanted to look his best for Mari, he remembers. He’d toyed with the idea of getting her flowers, but didn’t want to—
Does it matter? God, head wounds bleed so much. Hero feels viscerally unwell.
His tie wouldn’t sit right. The mirror was on the front wall, sunlight streaming in behind him.
“Boys,” Dad had said.
Hero closes his eyes.
White walls. Those walls had been blue. Hero picks at his nails. Dad’s voice had been so…
Something was wrong, he knew already. Sunny couldn’t play? Didn’t want to play? Mari had been anxious about it—Hero had hoped she wouldn’t be too disappointed if they missed the recital.
Ha.
Kel’s crying still. He’d cried then, too.
“Boys,” Dad had said, and Hero had left his tie undone around his neck as he went to the bedroom door.
The blue and red lights drill a migraine directly through the centre of Hero’s forehead. The blood on his sleeves is sticky. He’s gonna have to give up on this sweater, he thinks. Polly is talking to the EMTs, which is nice, because it means Hero doesn’t have to.
She’s given them all more blankets. Aubrey already threw up, not long after the EMTs strapped Basil to the gurney. The ambulance with Sunny in it left ages ago. Ages? Maybe it was minutes. Hero has no idea.
Aubrey is trembling. Hero wonders if—
He doesn’t remember the words his dad had said. He just remembers a vicious swooping descent, his world suddenly coming apart.
But—his tie had been undone. Why does he remember that?
The back garden window had been—still is—high up. It overlooks their garden. Hero can see—
He hadn’t looked, hadn’t noticed the rush of activity next door. He doesn’t know how he hadn’t heard the sirens. He just remembers that the Double Windsor wasn’t sitting right, and he wanted Mari to smirk at him, to call him handsome again.
He’d tried to run to the window, he remembers. His dad had caught him before he’d managed. Now, years later, he is so grateful for that small mercy. He hadn’t seen her.
Aubrey is trembling, so Hero stands a little closer. She’s losing someone too. She already has.
White walls. Kel’s soft sniffling. The blood must have been mopped off the floor. Hero doesn’t remember that.
“Those were Sunny’s favourite,” comes Aubrey’s voice, small and strained. She’s looking at the bag of chips in Hero’s lap.
“Oh,” Hero says. “We can give them to him when he wakes up, then.”
No one says if. No one needs to.
But Aubrey smiles. Hero smiles. He thinks he hears Kel’s breathing jump, just shy of a laugh.
He hopes this isn’t the part he remembers, years later, when he thinks about Sunny. He hopes he’s got more memories with him by then.
The waiting is interminable, but at least they know what they’re waiting for this time.