Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sometimes

I just stare into space

Watch through all the film of my mistakes

I just can't help myself

All alone on the step

Waiting for the gates to open up

Oh brother, brother's keeper

I'll follow, will you lead us?

- Young the Giant, Brother’s Keeper

PART 1

Jordan’s life was good. She was awake. She was making art and selling it. She was making a name for herself. She was getting noticed by people she wanted to get noticed by. She had carved a new life for herself, no longer codependently sharing one with her reckless, passively-suicidal clone-sister. She had (mostly) patched things up in her relationship with said clone-sister, who these days seemed a lot less suicidal and only slightly less reckless. She had friends and a family, and a fiance she was appallingly and hopelessly in love with. 

Jordan’s life was good. 

Except for the fact that her beloved fiance was currently incomprehensible and half passed-out on the street. With quite a bit of clothing missing. In the freezing rain.

“Pozzi,” she said. “This is quite a statement. You should have told me we were doing performance art. I would’ve dressed the part. Why’s your shirt ripped? You doing Cut Piece ?”

His dress shirt had three buttons missing and the collar almost completely ripped off. His tie was gone, which for Declan, meant he was practically naked. 

“Mmmmuhhhhhhfffg,” he groaned. He had been going on like this for the past five minutes.

It appeared evident he had just left the seedy lounge across the street. About fifteen minutes ago, Jordan had received a text from his phone that only had an address and no other information. She wondered who had sent it - he didn’t appear to be in a state to text lucidly. 

Her first thought when she’d seen him was that he was hurt, but he didn’t appear to have any visible wounds. Beyond his torn clothes, there was no evidence of a fight. Then she wondered if he was having a stroke, but she couldn’t remember what the symptoms of a stroke were. 

“Are you having a stroke?” She asked him.

“Bleurgh,” he replied. 

“Really not helping your case here, mate.” The other option was of course that he was drunk, but she had never seen him this drunk before.

“Did someone roofie you? Should I call an ambulance?”

“No!” he said, suddenly alert. “Don’t… not roofies… dreams… somefucking… psycho-magic shit… fucked up… I’m… and didn’t know… horrible… briefcase.”

This string of words made no sense to Jordan, but she felt a chill go down her at the words dreams and magic . Looking at Declan now, there was something…different about him, beyond the fact that he was obviously smashed out of his mind. Some sort of aura of otherness . It was similar to the energy she generated when she was making sweetmetals, but inverted, somehow. When she was making sweetmetals, the air around her crackled with aliveness. The air around Declan seemed to be… dead. Empty. Dreadful. Supernaturally dreadful.

Perhaps there was some sort of magic dreamfuckery going on here, Jordan thought. She knew the work Declan dealt in. She knew the risks of it. She knew better than anyone that dreams were not always safe. In fact, they rarely ever were.

“What do you need?” Jordan asked, just as Declan choked out another string of words that sounded like Ronanmatthewronan and call and need and brothers.

Jordan’s heart lurched a little at the way he said the last word. Brothers. For some reason it reminded her of all the times Hennessy had called her, drunk, needing a ride or a nap or dream or a will to live. Truth be told their relationship was far from being fixed; truth be told, there was a lot they had not said to each other. Truth be told, learning to be your own person when you had spent your life trying to be someone else was not always as fun and freeing as it sounded. Truth be told it was often lonely.

Slowly, she helped Declan up onto a nearby bench. The she took out her phone and dialed a number.

Declan Lynch was not a fool. He was used to suspicion. He was used to strategy and carefully executed plans. He was used to revealing only what was necessary about himself and extracting and dissecting everything he could of someone else before deciding if they could be trusted and to what extent. He was used to lies and tricks and deceit. He was not used to honesty.

And yet here he was in a Situation, where against all his instincts, he had been honest, and now he was facing the consequences. The consequences of being honest: being lied to, tricked, and deceived. 

This was the Situation: 

He had gotten a call to meet a client at a seedy dive lounge. This was not unusual. The meeting had been about a product the client wanted Declan’s connections to sell to - also not unusual. The client had claimed the product would break minds and change the very fabric of people’s lives . This, while dramatic, was not entirely unusual. Declan was in the business of dreams. He was no stranger to mind-breaking things. His family was made of them.

The client also did not in any way look unusual. He was a dark-haired caucasian man, about thirty or forty, with angular but handsome features. If Declan had let himself think it, he would have thought he looked a little like an older version of himself. Which is to say, he looked a little like Niall.

They exchanged niceties and small talk. (The client did not sound like Niall, which Declan would have been relieved to notice, if he had let himself notice such a thing. He did not, because he could not allow himself to think about Niall right now. He was definitely not thinking about Niall right now.)

They got down to business. 

“As I said on the phone,” the client said. “The product I have to offer you is quite unique. I’m certain you have never seen anything like it before.”

“People say that all the time,” Declan said coolly. “No offense.”

The client chuckled. “None taken. Instead of prattling on about it, why don’t I show you, eh?”

“You have it here?” Declan asked. 

The client plopped his briefcase on the table. “In there,” he said. “Open it.”

Warily, Declan opened it. He didn’t know what to expect. He had seen a lot of weird dreamthings. Songs that floated in the air, birds that were also words, boxes that managed to be square without having any corners. The thing in the briefcase was not that. It was an ordinary-looking bottle of pills.

“What is this, some kind of drug?” Declan asked.

“It is in the form of a drug, yes,” the client said. “But it is really quite more than that.”

“What does it do?”

“What does it do, he asks! Let me ask you a question, Mr. Lynch. Who in your life have you hurt most? Lovers? Friends? Family? Ah, family, is it,”

Declan hadn’t said anything, but the man pointed at him as if he had caught some imperceptible change in Declan’s expression. “Let me guess. Children?”

“Brothers,” Declan said. 

He wasn’t sure why he said it. Something about this man unnerved him. Normally, this would mean Declan would double down on the lies and the secrecy; the more wary he was, the less he could risk giving away. But there was something about the way this man was looking at him, like he was looking into him, seeing things Declan himself did not want to admit were there. He had an insane premonition that if he did not tell this man the truth, the man would twist the truth out of him and turn it into a worse version of itself. Every single one of Declan’s instincts was screaming at him to run away, but instead, he held the man’s gaze as the word hung in the open air between them. Brothers.

“Ah,” the client said, like he had known all along this was the answer. “I had a feeling that was the case. You remind me of myself, you know.”

“In what way?”

“You carry your guilt around with you like a briefcase.”

Declan put the bottle of pills back in the case, careful not to change his expression. He took a sip of his water.

What the client didn’t know is that guilt didn’t even begin to cover it. 

He felt no remorse for what he’d done to free the prisoners at the Fairy Market. Perhaps this was because he felt like it was justified. He knew if he hadn’t killed those guards, the prisoners would have continued to live lives of terror, being tortured, mutilated, enslaved, and god knows what else. A few of them had found ways to leave anonymous messages, thanking him profusely for saving their lives. One of the messages had quite a hefty sum of cash attached to it. He knew many would view him as a hero. Others, as a cold-blooded killer. 

He suspected, though, what was closer to the truth, was that he felt no remorse because he simply had no remorse left to feel. He’d used all of it up on his brothers.

He still remembered it like it was yesterday. The way that void had stretched in him. Matthew, dead, because of him. Ronan, dying, also in many ways because of him. Declan had failed both of them horribly. All those years, all his youth wasted trying to fill a Niall-shaped hole in his family. Not realizing that in the process he was creating a new hole, where a brother, not a father, should have been. 

These were thoughts he tried not to let himself think. They never lead anywhere good. Guilt was a feeling best reserved for Sunday mass, then carefully tucked back into the closet with your church clothes when it was over. Nothing productive came from dirtying it up during the week.

“You’re not the only one,” the client continued. “Everyone harbors guilt in them in some way. Some more than others. Some who feel it more than they should, others who feel it less. What would you give to make the person who hurt you keel over in the shame of what they’ve done? What would you give to free yourself of yours?”

Declan was starting to feel a bit lightheaded as the man spoke. He put his fingers to his temples.

“The thing is that guilt is unreliable, anyway,” the client went on. “You never quite know whether or not your perception of the hurt you caused is the truth, do you? The mind plays tricks on us. Absolves us when we should not be absolved and blames us when we should not be blamed. What if there was a way to make it more… objective?”

The pressure in his head was more of a pounding now, but Declan had to admit he was intrigued. “Objective how?”

“What if there was a drug that could make you feel all the pain you have ever caused others? Or at the very least, all of the worst pains? I don’t think it would be possible to account for every pain, you see, without killing a person, because surely we’ve all squashed enough bugs and eaten enough burgers to be tormented for eternity if we really got into it. Plus, that opens up a whole book of ethical dilemmas, like who’s fault is it really, that a cow had to die for that burger or that a child had to suffer in a sweatshop for you to enjoy that cherry coke?”

Declan’s stomach began to twist with nausea. He suspected he was having a migraine.

“And not to mention the ripples of suffering, the grief of the friends of the cow and the family of the child and all the lives that get spun into their webs and passed on into new ones. Intergenerational trauma, now she’s one hell of a bitch. But, now, personal, direct harms, human-to-human harms, the ones that leave the most immediate scars. Those are the ones we could feel. Those are the ones we could make people feel. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Declan could not see a lot at the moment, as he was beginning to have spots in his vision. “I’m sorry, I believe I’m having a migraine,” Declan said. “Perhaps we should continue this meeting another time.”

“Oh, but why would we do that, when this is going so well? I know you see the value of this product, but perhaps you haven’t even imagined all of the possibilities. Think: hard-core self-development for masochists; the next ayahuasca. Think: alternative forms of justice, power back from the state to the individual. Why press charges and let a jury do the work when you could handle it yourself? I don’t even think you’ve considered the use it could have for you, Mr. Lynch,” the client said. “When was the last time you unpacked your briefcase?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m interested in selling this product,” Declan said. 

“Oh, that’s a shame,” the client said. “I really do hope you change your mind, after you see for yourself.”

“What do you mean, when I see for my-” Declan said, and then suddenly he understood. The wooziness. The nausea. The head-spinning. The man’s strange effect on him. It was happening now. 

Declan barely had time to perceive the client casually zipping up his briefcase before he began to feel Everything.

This was the consequence of being honest: you could no longer hide from yourself.

He felt the gunshots first. 

It was a familiar feeling, as he had been shot before. But this time it was not one shot, but three. Five. Seven. Twelve. They appeared one right after another, sprouting like flowers from his torso, his legs, his head. He clutched at his body where he felt each wound, but there was no blood. The pain was real, but it was invisible. Psychological. Unexplainable. It dragged him under like a riptide. He fell to the floor.

None of that compared to the pain of what came next.

He was Ronan. He was every time he had gotten onto Ronan about his grades, about his choices and prospects, every time he had tried enforcing a set of rules that outfitted Ronan not like a life vest, but a straitjacket. He felt the cruel absurdity of them, these rules; completely arbitrary standards made for people, not for dreamers, not for gods. He had never thought Ronan had cared anyway. He had always acted like he didn’t, but now he saw what a lie that was. He felt how desperately Ronan had needed to fit himself into these ridiculous limits specifically because they made him human, they made him family, and he felt how much it killed him to shave off parts of himself to do so. He felt the hopelessness Ronan had felt in getting him, Declan, to understand this. No wonder Ronan had crises of mass destruction. How else could he get Declan to listen?

He was Matthew. Oh, God, Matthew. He was Matthew discovering he was a dream, his entire reality crumbling around him, only to watch Declan respond with annoyance and exasperation. He watched from Matthew’s perspective as he, Declan, treated Matthew like a pet, like a pest, like a situation to be dealt with. He was Matthew on a loop of going to school and coming home and going to sleep, consciousness stolen and returned, the same day on repeat, over and over again. He was Matthew needing Delcan and hating Declan and missing Declan. He was Matthew feeling unloved by Declan, the same way Declan had felt unloved by Niall, and oh , what a lie, what a horrible, horrible lie. He was the sweetmetal being ripped off of Matthew’s throat. 

Declan doubled over and vomited. 

He tried to stand up. Somehow he had crawled his way out of the lounge but had no memory of it. He was sprawled on the sidewalk now by the street, gripping the edge of a metal bench for dear life. The client was nowhere to be seen. He felt for his phone. It wasn’t in his pocket. Shit, fuck. The client must have stolen it. He only had half a second to think about this revelation before the pain overtook him again.

He was shot, he was dying. He was every one of his ex-girlfriend’s horrid disbelief when he broke it off with a cold It seems this relationship is no longer working for both of our best interests and I think we should cut our losses now. He was every punch he’d given Ronan, both with fists and with words. The words hurt worse. He felt them tearing at him like a seam ripper pulling a thread, unmaking him. If dad saw this is what you were doing , If you could just think for once , go to school and keep your head down, Ronan, it’s not fucking hard . Then there were the non-words, the silences. The refusals to acknowledge. Matthew asking Declan a question and Declan staring at his phone. Declan just sighing as Matthew slammed a car door in a futile attempt for some kind of recognition. The empty space in the car filled with all the words he could have said. 

He was Ronan and Matthew and Ronan and Matthew and Ronan and -

The pain receded again and Declan gasped like he was coming up for air.  He ripped frantically at the collar of his shirt, which was choking him - God , it was always choking him . The pain seemed to be coming in waves. He just had to capitalize on the time when the crest was low to maximize his chances of getting - somewhere - a plan, he needed a plan - if he could just find a phone, call Jordan -

“Pozzi?” Jordan’s voice said. “Is that you? What on Earth…” 

Declan wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating her or not. Evidence of the last few minutes indicated that his current perception of reality could not be trusted. He waited for the hit of pain to come, for his mind to be thrust into some moment he had hurt her without knowing. It didn’t come. The pain had almost completely receded, but he felt weak, ill, feeble. He tried to open his mouth to speak and found that he could not make anything but slurred nonsense come out.

Jordan continued talking, and he found he had difficulty making out her words as well. Something about was he having a stroke and should she call an ambulance , to which he thought he said no, but he wasn’t sure the message came out right. He didn’t need to be coddled in a hospital room, he needed -

“My brothers,” he choked out. “Ronan. Matthew. I need my brothers.” 

He needed to make it right, somehow, if not to beg for forgiveness, then to at least make sure they knew he understood. He wasn’t sure any of this had gotten through to Jordan, but he caught a glimpse of her taking out her phone and saying some quick, urgent words to the person on the other end. She rubbed his back after helping him properly onto the bench, voice a mixture of soothing and annoyance. He wasn’t sure how much time passed; time didn’t feel as if it were happening very linearly at the moment.

And then, miraculously, what felt like both minutes and centuries later, he heard a familiar squeal of tires on the road, and looked up to see the stark headlights of Ronan’s BMW pull up. His body rushed with relief.

Then he blacked out. 

Chapter Text

PART 2

Declan appeared to be drifting in and out of consciousness. 

This somehow made the task of getting him to the car more difficult than if he had just been passed out altogether. Whenever Ronan tried to pick him up, Declan would wake, start flailing wildly, attempt to walk himself, only to collapse boneless two seconds later. 

They couldn’t seem to agree on a method to remedy this issue. They had started with Ronan on one side and Matthew on the other, each with one of Declan’s arms slung around their shoulders. This method involved a great deal of dragging, which would have been doable if Declan had merely been asleep or drunk. Instead, with Declan being whatever this was, the dragging seemed to aggravate whatever mechanism was turning his consciousness on and off, because the flailing and flopping would drastically increase with every step. Frustrated, Ronan attempted to pick Declan up himself, princess-style, only for Declan to promptly kick him in the face.

“ Ow! Jesus shit, watch it, you bastard, I’m trying to fucking help you.”

Ronan hadn’t known what to expect when Jordan called. He rarely spoke to Jordan, which was perhaps the reason why he even bothered picking up the phone. He worried briefly that something had happened with Hennessy. He certainly hadn’t expected Jordan to tell him that his brother was in trouble and asking for him. He definitely didn’t expect that the brother in need of rescuing was Declan .

“He’s quite pissed,” Jordan had said “Drunk, I mean, not angry. Or- not drunk, but something like it. Could be high, but I don’t think it’s from a, uhh - ordinary substance.” 

She’d gone on to explain her hypothesis that there was some supernatural fuckery going on, and that Ronan should get there fast, and bring Matthew. Luckily, both Ronan and Matthew were already in Boston - or rather, Ronan was in Cambridge, but it was close enough. It took Ronan all of twenty minutes to arrive at the texted address after picking Matthew up from the dorms he was living in (he had transferred to a private high school in Boston to finish his senior year).

Now, he was starting to regret the urgency with which he had gotten here, because it didn’t seem to be making any difference.

“Maybe I should hold his feet while you guys take his top half,” Jordan suggested.

“We could tie him up? I have a scarf in the car,” Matthew added cheerfully.

“Mmbirds,” Declan chimed in.

“Shut up,” Ronan told him. “You’re not helping.” 

Ronan was having difficulty mitigating his frustration with the current predicament. This was part because he was still having difficulty wrapping his mind around the reality of the current predicament. This might sound like a strange dilemma to have for someone who is reality-breaking by nature. Ronan Lynch, who had manifested his younger brother and his bird and many other oddities straight from his brain, was no stranger to impossible things. Except this one:

Declan never needed Ronan’s help with anything. 

Declan never needed Ronan’s help, because Ronan was most often the issue that Declan needed help with . He was always the fire to be put out. In high school, it had been Declan and Gansey, trying to keep him from getting expelled. Just recently, it had been Declan and Adam, trying to stop Ronan from breaking the world. 

He hadn’t known how to make them understand that sometimes the world needed to be broken when living in it was breaking you.

Ronan sometimes wondered what it meant that he was capable of creating worlds and yet in every single one he found himself in, he was the problem.

There was a dream Ronan used to have when he was younger, that sometimes was a nightmare and sometimes was a wish. Younger Ronan couldn’t comprehend it being both, so his assessment of it changed depending on what mood he was in. In the dream, both of his brothers were dreamers like him. The brothers Lynch, all with the same uncanny ability to twist subconscious into reality when they woke. All of them impossible. None of them special. 

Sometimes, Matthew wasn’t in the dream - he couldn’t quite remember, but he may have even started dreaming it before Matthew was born. But there was always Declan. This Dream Declan was almost nothing like real Declan. Dream Declan was a collaborator and a co-conspirator. If Ronan had an idea, Dream Declan would be the one to help him flesh it out, iron out the details, plot out the steps. If Ronan said, I want a bird army , Declan would say, are you thinking different types of birds? If so, put the eagles in the back . If Ronan said I want a racecar with pizza for wheels , Dream Declan would say, make sure the pizza wheels don’t smell, or the animals will eat them. 

Ronan had told real Declan about the pizza wheels once. Real Declan’s response had been: “Don’t be stupid, Ronan.”

“It would work” Ronan had insisted. “They would be super hard wheels, because it’s dream pizza.”

Declan had just sighed and said, “If you dreamt that, we wouldn’t be able to take it anywhere. It would be too ridiculous and pointless to hide. We’d have to destroy it. You know that, right?”

Ronan stopped telling real Declan about his ideas.

Whenever Matthew was in the dream, his contribution to the plan would be to make sure that whatever it was they sought to create had the implicit ability to make someone smile. Dream Matthew was not so different from regular Matthew.

Sometimes over the course of the dream, Dream Declan’s face would change, and he would start to look a little too much like Ronan. Ronan would wake up in hot relief. This is when the dream was a nightmare. Sometimes during the dream, Ronan’s heart would swell with such lightness and belonging that he would forget that there was anyone in the world who was not a dreamer. This is when the dream was a wish. Sometimes he would wake up, and in place of that feeling there would be a cold, black terror growing inside him. This is when the dream was both.

The Declan Ronan was currently trying to wrangle to the car was like neither Dream Declan nor the brother he had grown up with. This Declan was more like a wild horse that had been given psychedelics and set loose in an antique store.

“Let’s try Jordan’s method,” Ronan said. “Except Matthew, you grab his other leg, so he can’t kick anyone else. I got his shoulders.” Matthew followed Ronan’s instructions, and together, they heaved Declan up and into the car.

“Fucking Christ,” Ronan said after it was done.

“You’re telling me,” Jordan said. “I don’t know what the hell happened to him, but I hope you can fix him. He seemed very… desperate for both of you.”

Ronan silently searched within himself for a place to store this information. He could not find it.

“Uhh, guys?” Matthew called from the car. “I think we should go. He just puked on my shoes again.”

That was all it took for Ronan’s pondering to be replaced with white-hot with fury. “Not in MY FUCKING CAR he did not. I’m going to kill him.” 

“Let’s get him back to our place,” Jordan said. “You can kill him there.”

They reconvened at Jordan and Declan’s shared apartment. Declan sat sprawled on the couch, no longer loopy but still obviously tired. Jordan sat cross-legged on the floor across from him. There were plenty of chairs she could have sat in, but she always seemed to prefer the floor. Matthew had asked her about it once, but she’d just shrugged and said, “Feels organic. Maybe it’s connecting me to my ancestors or something, mate, I don't know.” 

(“Are they even your ancestors if you’re a dream?” Matthew had asked. “That, mate, sounds like a question to ask when you’re sitting on the floor,” Jordan had replied. Matthew had decided to try it. He found that she wasn’t wrong. The floor was pretty nice.)

He considered sitting on the floor now, but Ronan was standing, in a way that suggested he was going to keep standing, and Matthew didn’t want him to be the only one.

“The client must have sent you that text from my phone, Jordan, but I don’t know why,” Declan was saying. “I’ll have to track him down - confidential information on the phone - I should be able to reset it from afar…”

Now that Declan had the brain cells to worry, he had been doing a lot of it. Declan had been a worrier for as long as Matthew had been alive, and Matthew suspected he had probably come out of the womb doing it. 

“Let’s skin that cat later,” Jordan said, an expression which both concerned Matthew for its violence and pleased him for its silliness. Declan appeared to snap back to the present moment.

“Right,” Declan said. “Back to, uh, the order at hand.” He stumbled over this Declanism in a very un-Declan-like way. 

“It’s not a business meeting, love,” Jordan said.

Ronan barked a cold laugh. “Every family meeting is a business meeting with him.”

“Shit,” Declan said. “I know, listen, I’m - sorry.” He ran his hands tensely through his damp hair. “I…don’t know how to do this.”

Matthew looked at Ronan. He looked just as bewildered as Matthew felt.

“Do… what?” Ronan asked.

“Apologize.” He laughed humorlessly after he said it. “That was never something dad did very much of, was it? At least, not directly.” 

Niall Lynch’s idea of an apology had been gifts and grandeur. Elaborate distractions so complete you forgot you were ever upset in the first place. He was like a magician, in that way - not the real kind, but the false kind. The kind that sawed women in half and pulled rabbits out of hats. His trick was weaving stories out of thin air that made him the hero and you the hero’s beloved, and in that sleight of hand you found you had already forgotten the reality you were living in before. The one where he was not a hero with lovable foils, but a father with woundable sons. Abracadabra. There is not much of a difference between magic and lies, after all.

Matthew had never thought much about it, before. He hadn’t thought much about anything before. He thought a lot about it now.

“Apologize for what, exactly?” Ronan asked flatly. “If it’s about kicking me in the face and getting vomit on Matthew’s shoes and all over my fucking car and being a general miserable pain in the fucking ass tonight, don’t waste your breath, because I’ve already decided I’m going to be holding this over you for the rest of your life.”

Declan squeezed his eyes shut. “Listen, I… fine. That’s fair. I give you permission to be an obnoxious asshole about it until we’re eighty. God knows I’ve probably earned it.  I am sorry you all had to… God.” He covered his face with his hands and let out a shaky sound that could have been a laugh or a cry. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

“How the fuck was it supposed to happen like? What the hell did you take , anyway?” Ronan’s voice was a strange mixture of fury and something Matthew thought might be close to awe. “God, I can’t believe after all those years of getting on to me about drinking -”

“I didn’t take anything,” Declan cut him off. “At least, not intentionally. The - the client, the one I was meeting with. He drugged me. But it wasn’t a normal drug. It was some god-forsaken dream shit. Listen. I don’t understand how it works but I… I need to explain.” He paused, licking his chapped lips.

“Explain then, Einstein.” Ronan said. “Explain why this dream drug made you more impossible to wrangle than a rabid dog and a cross-faded party girl.”

“Hey,” Jordan cut in. “Don’t talk about Hennessy like that.”

Ronan snorted. “Good one.”

Declan closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the couch. “If you could just give me a fucking second.”

“Oh, you mean like you gave me a second when you kicked me in the fucking face ?” There was an air of cruel amusement to his voice now, like he was enjoying this particular turn of the table in their relationship.

“Ronan,” Declan groaned. “I know I gave you permission to hold this over me, but do you have to do all your goading right fucking now?”

“I really, really do,” Ronan said. 

“You did kind of ask for it, love,” Jordan muttered.

“Need I remind you you puked on my fucking car ,” Ronan continued. “How many times does this make for you being knocked on your ass by dream shit? Three? There was Bryde’s balls, and dad’s freaky memory shit -”

“Don’t talk about dad’s memories or Bryde’s balls. And I’ll get your damn car cleaned,” Declan said.

“You will get my damn car cleaned professionally ,” Ronan amended. “High end shit, most detailed service you can find. No skimping.”

“Guys,” Matthew said. He was getting tired of listening to this squabble. “This isn’t fun. I wanna hear what Declan has to say.”

Ronan looked like he was about to protest that it was fun for him, but Jordan spoke before he got the chance.

“Matthew is right,” she said. “Let’s give the man a break, Ronan. He’s been tortured enough for now. Go on and tell us.” She directed this last part to Declan.

Declan looked up at her with gratitude. “Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Jordan said. “I do fully intend to resume the torturing later. I want to make it clear that I was not planning on spending my Saturday night ruining my perfectly good dress to scrape my fiance off the street in the freezing rain.”

Delcan swallowed and smiled a tight smile. “Right. Anyway…” He trailed off again

Jordan raised her eyebrows and made a hand gesture that seemed to say get fucking to it.

“Right. Let me explain.” He took a deep breath like he was about to begin, and then he shook his head again.

“Actually,” he said. “I should probably begin with a story.”

When Matthew had first come home, after walking from the museum for days, both of his brothers had lost their minds. 

At first, it had been too many emotions for words, and they had simply embraced and sobbed over him with the fierceness of wild animals. 

Then, there were the questions, that came out like demands, spiraling through tones of fury and bewilderment before falling back into bone-melting relief. Where have you BEEN? Are you hurt? You couldn’t CALL? What do you mean you walked? Good God, Matthew . This last part was followed by hysterical laughter, which was followed by more tears. God, Matthew… God. 

Matthew hadn’t known what to say. He hadn’t expected this reaction. He hadn’t considered the possibility of his brothers thinking he was dead. He’d simply just… needed to walk. So he walked.

He felt guilty, to see how much he had frightened them. But he also felt a little glad. He always liked to be fawned over, but this was different - he couldn’t remember the last time the three of them had embraced, all together. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time Declan and Ronan had shared more than a handshake. They had been fighting for so, so long. They didn’t seem to be fighting now. Matthew didn’t know if this was temporary, or if his disappearance and fake death had somehow made them remember that they loved each other, but he didn’t want it to stop. All he had ever wanted was for all of them to get along.

Declan seemed to have changed in other ways. For one, he seemed to have broken the switch in him that had previously frozen his tear ducts and kept his face in a permanently constipated expression, because he was crying a lot now. It was a bit disconcerting. Matthew had wondered at first if it was a medical condition and considered asking Declan if he needed to go to the doctor, but he was afraid that might worry him and make him cry more.

Declan also refused to let Matthew out of his sight. That first night, both of his brothers had been so reluctant to let go of him, he’d had to push them off. “I need to shower,” he’d told them, and they’d begrudgingly agreed. After, they had all fallen asleep on the couch - Declan slumped against one side, Ronan on the other, Matthew sprawled between them, somehow ending up with Ronan’s feet in his face. When Matthew had woken up the next morning, he found Ronan had gone, but Declan was still there, asleep, his arm tight around Matthew protectively, nearly choking him. 

“Deklo,” Matthew had said as Declan came to. “I’m okay. You can let go now.”

This had prompted more tears for reasons Matthew could not quite understand. But Declan had just breathed deep and said “Okay.”

Then he’d let Matthew go.

Like Niall Lynch, Declan had a penchant for storytelling. He began this story the same way he began all of them. He waited until they were quiet, until the silence pulsed so much with possibility it began to build a story out of itself. Then, he began:

“There once was a man, the oldest of his family, with two younger brothers. The father, before he died, took the eldest son into a hidden room in the house and showed him a secret. Do you know what the secret was?”

“A dream?” Matthew guessed. 

“No,” Declan said.

“A painting?” asked Jordan, at the same time that Ronan said, “A weapon.”

Declan shook his head again. “The secret was a mask.”

Matthew wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw Ronan tense.

“The mask was wooden. It was painted red and black and white, with a long cylindrical nose, and grinned in an unsettling way. The man thought it looked sort of like the devil. The father said to the son:

‘I wish I didn’t have to show you this. But it’s time you knew. When I die, someone in this family will have to wear this mask, or everything we have will fall apart. It will not fit either of your brothers. It will have to be you.’”

There was a pause so long Matthew wondered if he was finished. But when Matthew looked at him, he saw that Declan’s brows were knitted together, which was his Thinking Face. “Then what happened?” Matthew urged.

“Then,” Declan continued slowly. “The day came when the father died. The son didn’t want to believe the story, but he was afraid. Bad things started happening to his family, and he feared he had no choice. He went to the hidden room where the mask was, and he saw…” He trailed off, as if for dramatic effect, but then he did not continue.

“He saw what?” Matthew asked, worried Declan might pass out again.

“He went into the room,” Declan started again. “Like his father told him, and he -”

“No,” Declan cut himself off abruptly, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I shouldn’t be telling it like this. I’m not a hero. I’m not dad.”

This admission cut through the air with a crack of electricity. It felt like a blanket being ripped off a hand-made fort. It was not that what he said was anything they didn’t already know. It was simply the force of the story halted, the fourth wall broken, the set of the movie falling away, curtains parting to reveal the naked backstage cast.

“Listen,” Declan continued. “Here’s what happened: the client drugged me. He must have mixed one of the pills in my water before I even sat down. I don’t know why. But the drug, it… it made me feel things.”

“How terrible,” Jordan said earnestly. Declan graced this comment with a small smile before he continued explaining, with all the storytelling and grandeur gone from his voice, what the drug had actually made him feel.

“I felt what you felt, every time I had… every time I was an awful brother. There’s no better way to explain it. I know it’s not the same as living it, when you both had to deal with it for years, and I can’t say with certainty how accurate a reflection the pain was, but I just… I know I fucked up, okay? That’s the gist of it. I treated you both like… like problems to be managed. I promise that’s not all you were to me. Not what you are. I was focused so hard on trying to keep us safe after dad died and I was just so fucking blind. I want to do better. I’m sorry.”

The words hung in the air. Matthew replayed them in his head, and then he looked at his brother. The expression on Declan’s face was one he had not seen before. Or… now that he thought about it, it was one he had seen before, but only in glimpses. He remembered catching it in Declan’s reflection in the kitchen window one morning after Niall died. Half a second of it before Declan turned his face away after a fight with Ronan. From his profile in the silent moments Declan would sometimes sit motionless in the car for several minutes after getting gas. It was an expression Matthew had never tried to make sense of before. Probably because he didn’t have the words for it. Or maybe because it was something… unsettling. 

One time in a science class, Matthew had been instructed to dissect a rabbit. It was one of the few things in school he did not enjoy. He remembered the sensation of vertigo as the furry skin peeled back, revealing pink and brown blobs of flesh and organs, how sad and frightened and awed he felt as the rabbit turned inside out. It felt like a pretty lie being untold. Wrongness that was only wrong because you knew deep down it was right. That was the feeling Matthew got seeing the expression on Declan’s face.

Matthew remembered the fury he had felt when he woke up after the sweetmetal incident and found Declan had stolen days from him. Years, really, considering all the lies he had been told, the very nature of his existence being the biggest one of them. But that hadn’t just been Declan’s lie. It was also Ronan’s. It was also Niall’s. If Matthew was very honest with himself, he might admit that in a way it was also his own. Surely there had been signs, many of them, that he’d willfully ignored. Did it make you stupid or smart, to have the ability to believe yourself into a story you wanted to be true?

Matthew considered that maybe all these years, Declan had been doing the same. Maybe they all had been. Lying was a habit they all had been born into. It didn’t make any of it right. But Matthew thought now he understood.

Matthew walked over to the couch and sat down next to Declan. He put his hands on his brother’s shoulders and slowly leaned him back so he lay across Matthew’s lap. Declan closed his eyes.

“You took care of us for a long time, Deklo,” Matthew said. “I think… sometimes, you should let us take care of you.”

They were quiet for a long time. Then, after Matthew thought Declan might have fallen asleep, Ronan asked, “How did it end?” His voice was softer than usual. “The story, with the mask.”

“Oh,” Declan said. “When the son went to the room where the mask was, he found that it was gone. What hung in its place was a mirror. In his reflection, he saw how his skin melded with edges of red and black wood. The mask - he hadn’t realized that he was already wearing it. He had been wearing it the whole time.”

Ronan didn’t say anything in response to this. He just let out a long breath and then walked to the other side of the couch and squeezed himself in, picking up Declan’s feet to make room. Then he closed his eyes and threw his head back like he was going to sleep.

Jordan got up and found a blanket and placed it over them, then she kissed Declan on the head and quietly left the room.

They stayed like that, the three of them tangled together, a perfect mirror of the night Matthew had come home. Right before Matthew lulled off to sleep, he had the thought that maybe the real story of the Lynch family could be even better the fake one. Maybe there was magic that was not made of lies at all.

While the Lynch brothers slept soundly, Jordan painted.

They made a wondrous picture. The dreamer, the dreamt, and the protector of dreams. The secret keeper, the secret maker, and the secret itself. Looking at them made Jordan’s heart ache. It also made her miss Hennessy.

She painted the portrait of them quietly, so they would not wake and notice her. She focused on getting the brushstrokes right - trying to capture the way their limbs sprawled and intertwined, like branches on a tree. The trunk of them, a single entity. A family of boys that had grown up too fast, in less than nurturing conditions. The way they laid together on the couch communicated everything about how they’d had to rely on each other to keep themselves alive. She tried to capture this. Each of their bodies told other stories, about how they’d had to grow apart from the others to find sustenance for themselves. There was grief in these stories. She tried to capture this, too.

When she was done, she stepped back and looked at her finished piece in the moonlight, and she thought of the trunk she had grown from. She took out her phone and typed a text:

Heloise. You awake?

Hennessy’s response was fast. As I’ve ever been.

Jordan slipped outside into the brisk night air. The wind waltzed around her face, and a leaf from a nearby oak tree landed on her head. She walked down the stairs of the second-story apartment and found a place to sit on the small grassy lawn below. 

Jordan’s life was good. There was something that felt dangerous about your life being good after you had spent so long simply trying to make it survivable . Best not to test your luck. Best to keep it at merely good and not strive for anything more. That was what she had told herself. Now though, she thought maybe that made good a pretty miserable way to live.

She looked up at the sky. It was cloudy and polluted, but if she focused her eyes, she could still see the suggestion of stars. Looking at them was a bit like looking at a canvas and seeing its potential. A bit, she realized, like making sweetmetals. You could find magic anywhere, truly, so long as you were willing to pull back the layers.

Jordan looked back down at her phone. She pressed the call button. 

Jordan’s life was good. She wanted to make it better.

“Where are you?” She said when the other line clicked. “I’ll meet you there.”

THE END