Chapter 20: Brother & Brother
The pouch had gone quiet around him, the way it did when Kaelen finally let the day go. Liam lay on his side with one cheek flat against the lining, one arm folded under his head, and felt the slow tidal press of the muscle against his ribs. Warm as a mouth. Warmer than the bed.
Then Kaelen's hand came up on the outside.
He felt the shift first, the long muscle of the throat moving under him, and then the weight of it, a broad palm laid flat over the pouch. The gauze printed itself through the skin, that faint crosshatch of weave pressed over Liam's shoulder blade. Kaelen held it there without pressing.
So Liam turned his face into the wall of him and ground his cheek and his brow against the lining.
The tissue gave, exactly the way it always gave, soft and alive and wet with a thin film that was not quite spit and not quite sweat. It smelled of Kaelen. Woodsmoke, tea, the salt underneath all of it. Liam pushed harder, dragged his face sideways along it, and the pouch answered: a long ripple that travelled from the entrance behind his heels up the length of his back and closed in along his legs.
The purr started.
It came from under him and around him at once, a low continuous roll of sound carried through muscle and bone. Liam's ribs took it like a struck drum. His teeth buzzed with it, and the hairs stood up on his forearms, and he opened his mouth against the lining and breathed it in.
Kaelen's thumb moved. One slow arc across the outside, tracing the line where Liam's spine lay against the skin from the base of his neck to the small of his back. Liam arched into it the way he would have arched into a hand at his nape. His tail uncurled and curled again, the tip stroking the pouch's inner wall in small, absent circles.
They did not speak.
The house settled around them, one long creak from the kitchen end, the way it did when the night cooled. Kaelen's wing drew in tighter against his back, the leather of it rustling over wool. His tail pulled up along the quilt, and Liam heard it, felt the small change in the angle of the body he was lying inside. Kaelen had turned his head. He was watching the window.
The moonbeam had reached the foot of the bed.
Liam tracked it the only way he could, by the sounds, by the patient weight of the hand that never lifted. The floorboards were oak and old, and the light crossing them made no sound at all, but he knew the room. He knew the boards by heart from the top of Kaelen's shoulder. The beam would be past the foot of the bed now, stretched long and thin across the rug, inching toward the wall. It would touch the wall eventually, and when it did, it would begin to climb the timber in a slow pale column.
His brother's breathing changed around him. Slower. Deeper. The purr thinned almost to nothing, then came back stronger, as though Kaelen had decided on something and settled into it.
Inside the pouch, the lining tightened once, unhurriedly, and let go.
Liam pressed both palms flat against the inside of it and pushed back. Not to get out. Just to answer.
The purr rolled up through the tissue into his chest, so deep it seemed to come down from the roof of Kaelen's throat and up from the base of his ribs at the same time. Liam's eyes closed on their own. He kept his hands where they were and let it work through him, the way he let the kettle work through a room, a whole-body hum he could feel in his kneecaps.
Neither of them moved. Not while the moonbeam crossed the floorboards. Not while it found the wall.
Kaelen's hand shifted at last.
The fingers spread wide over the outside, covering the pouch almost from the throat down to the collarbone, and the palm pressed in, unbandaged at the heel where the gauze had worked loose. Skin to skin through the wall of it. Liam turned his face back into the lining and ground it there again, and there was nothing in his head at all except the pressure from outside and the answering from within.
"Still awake?" Kaelen said.
It came down through him as much as it came in his ears, the words flattened and enormous, the way all speech sounded from in here.
"Yeah," Liam said. His voice went nowhere. He tried again, louder, with his cheek still mashed to the tissue. "Yeah. I'm awake."
"Sleep, then."
"In a minute."
The hand did not move. Liam lay and listened to the blood and the settling timber and the far, faint nothing of the hills beyond the window. There was a count running in the back of his skull, and he had been refusing it for hours, and it refused to be refused any longer.
"Two days," Liam said.
Above him, the heartbeat sped up and then deliberately slowed. He felt Kaelen make it slow, felt the particular effort of it, the same discipline his brother used to keep his face flat in a yard full of men.
"Two days," Kaelen said.
"You'll be fine." Liam pressed his mouth to the wall of the pouch and left it there, a kiss against warm, living muscle. "I'll be in your shirt pocket, or wherever you want me, and you'll say it just the way you said it on the rug. That's all the board gets. Four sentences and out."
"Four sentences and out," Kaelen repeated, and the purr started up properly again under the words.
The pouch pulled in around Liam, snugging him from shoulder to ankle, and stayed. Liam kept his palms spread wide and let the whole of his weight go slack into it. Beyond the walls of his brother, in the room, the moonlight had begun its climb up the western timber, pale as milk, and neither of them watched it anymore.
Kaelen kept his hand where it was until the pale column had climbed the western timber and gone grey at the edges. The small weight inside him turned over once, then settled, an animal arranging itself for the night. He could feel the two flat palms through the wall of his own throat, warm as coins left in a pocket.
He thought about moving. He didn't.
Sleep came the way it came now, not falling but loosening, the room going soft at the corners. His last clear thought was that the palms hadn't moved, and that he hadn't asked them to.
Morning found him a long way down. He surfaced into grey, then into the colour of wet slate, then into a thin gold seam along the sill. The fire in the hearth had gone to ash hours ago. He could smell the cold of it.
Something was crawling around under his jaw.
He was half in a dream still, so his first thought was his own pulse, gone wrong. It wasn't. The movement was small and busy and had direction. Hands and knees. A slow tour of the lining, one wall and then the other, the way Liam walked a shelf when he had decided he wanted something off the top of it.
Kaelen's throat worked. A groan came up out of him and got into the pillow.
"Hmm Li. Stop. I'm trying to sleep."
Nothing stopped. The crawling stopped for about a second. Then the pressing started, both palms flat and bearing down, and his whole throat went tight around it. That was past tickling. That was a hand working at a knot in his back, except the knot was the inside of his neck and he couldn't get away from it.
He rolled onto his back. The pouch moved with him and did not loosen. His healing wing complained where he'd been lying on the joint, and he got his hand up as far as his own collarbone and left it there with his eyes shut.
"Li."
The answer arrived from inside him, tiny and enormous at once, and he felt it in his back teeth.
"You're awake, though."
"I'm not."
"You said that out loud. Awake people say things out loud."
Kaelen laughed. He hadn't meant to. It started low in his chest and came out wrecked, the laugh of a man who'd slept eight hours with a rock under his ribs, and the pouch clenched around the small body in it and made everything worse. Liam made a noise of pure satisfaction, muffled through tissue.
"Stop it," Kaelen said.
"Make me."
"I can make you."
"You can't reach me."
That was true and they both knew it. He couldn't reach him with anything but his tongue or his thumb on the outside, and his thumb on the outside was useless. He lifted his chin off the pillow and tried working him up toward the entrance with the muscle, a slow deliberate contraction, and the small weight braced and held. Liam had his feet wedged. He'd been wedging himself in there since he was old enough to know better.
The tickling started again at the far end, down near the base of his throat, light and quick.
Kaelen's foot kicked the quilt off. His tail came up off the mattress, thumped once, and lay still. Neither of those was a decision he had made.
"You're doing that on purpose."
"Yeah."
"Why?"
The hands paused. He waited, and under the pause he felt the small ribs working, which meant Liam was deciding how much to say, which meant he had already decided and was only choosing the words.
"You make a noise," Liam said. "When you're half awake. Right at the edge of it, before you're properly up. It's not words."
Kaelen lay still and looked at the ceiling beams.
"That's why you were crawling around in there at dawn."
"Not asleep anymore, though, are you?"
No. He wasn't. He could feel it in the set of his jaw now, and in the way the room had stopped being soft and had started being a room. The tiredness had been pushed out of him like water out of a boot.
Kaelen brought his hand down and laid it flat over his own throat, the way he'd done in the dark. The gauze printed against his skin. Under his palm the small shape went still, and he could feel it through the wall of the pouch, a hand's width of another person, breathing.
"You want out or not?" he said.
"No."
"Say it properly."
"No," Liam said, into the wall. "Not really."
Kaelen let his hand stay. He kept it there while he counted the beams, and while the gold seam on the sill widened and turned white, and while the house creaked once at the kitchen end the way it always did when the night gave up. His own purr had started somewhere down in his chest and he could not remember when, and he did not bother stopping it, because it was too late for that and he had never once managed to stop it on purpose anyway.
Liam felt it arrive. He turned over against the wall and pushed his back into it, the full length of him, so the vibration came through his spine instead of his hands, and he stayed there and let it run.
"Breakfast," Kaelen said eventually.
"In a minute."
"That's what you said last night."
"And I was right."
Kaelen shifted his weight and sat up, one leg off the side of the bed, the cold of the floorboards hitting his foot. The pouch shifted with him and held. He found his shirt where he'd left it on the chair, dragged it on over the wing, and stood.
Then he walked out to the cold hearth and knelt there in the ash and lit the fire, with his brother still curled inside his throat, and neither of them said another word about any of it.
The fire caught on the third match, which was two more than it usually took. Kaelen sat back on his heels in the ash and listened to the small sounds that meant his brother was still awake in there, a shifting of weight, a hand dragging along the lining. The kettle went on the hook. The kitchen end of the house began to smell of smoke and iron and nothing else.
He got a plate down. Bread, butter, the last of the good jam. He set it on the table and pulled out a chair and sat.
"You want out for this?" he said.
"No."
"Liam."
"I'm fine."
He ate alone. It had been years since he had eaten alone in this house, and he found he did not much like the shape of it, the plate with nothing small sitting on the rim. He finished the bread and drank the tea hot enough to scald and felt it go down past the pouch, past his brother, who had gone quiet and heavy against the back of his throat.
The morning went that way. He banked the fire and swept the hearth. He unbandaged his hands and looked at the blisters, which had gone flat and grey and were finally past the stage where they split. He wrapped them again, looser, and the gauze sat differently against the outside of his throat when he pressed there out of habit.
Around noon Liam surfaced.
It happened without warning or speech. Kaelen felt the shift, the crawl up toward the entrance, the small hands finding the edge of his jaw. He opened his mouth and Liam came out onto his palm, blinking in the daylight, hair dark with the wet of the pouch and stuck to his forehead in ropes.
"Bathroom," he said.
Kaelen carried him. He set him on the lip of the basin and turned his back and stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, looking at the hall. When Liam was done, Kaelen held out his hand again and Liam climbed into it without a word and lay there on his back, four inches of him, breathing, staring at the ceiling.
"You want water?" Kaelen said.
"Yeah."
He dripped a capful into his own cupped hand and Liam drank from the hollow of it, both hands braced on Kaelen's thumb, and his throat moved when he swallowed. The gauze was rough on his side. Kaelen watched him drink and did not think about anything in particular.
"Food?" he said.
"Bring it in there."
"You could sit at the table."
"I know."
"So sit at the table."
Liam looked up at him. There was jam on his jaw from breakfast, a dried red smear. Kaelen wiped it off with the side of his thumb, careful, and his brother's eyes went half shut for the second it took.
"I'm staying in," Liam said. "Today. All of it."
Kaelen stood with his hand open and let that sit.
"All right," he said.
He fed him in pieces after that, torn crust and a spoon of jam, one small bite at a time, in the chair by the window with the weak sun coming in flat over the hills. Liam sat on his knee and ate and did not say much, and when he was done he wiped his hands on Kaelen's trouser leg and climbed back up the front of his shirt on his own, unhurried, hand over hand.
Kaelen tipped his chin up and let him in.
The wet warmth closed over him, and then the pouch drew in once, that soft involuntary grip, and Kaelen sat back in the chair and let out a breath he had been holding since the day Pete's truck pulled out of the yard. There. That was the whole of it. A small warm weight under his tongue, moving around in there, getting comfortable, and the terrible quiet of the house filled up again.
He did not mind.
That was the part he turned over on the walk out to the shed. He had been telling himself it was care all day, maintenance, the practical business of keeping a fragile thing safe. It was not that. He liked it. He liked the weight of him, the tick of him against the inside of his jaw, the way the pouch ached a little when Liam braced and pushed. His brother had spent the whole day inside him on purpose and Kaelen wanted him there and had not once asked him out.
He split kindling in the yard until his shoulders sang. The tail kept the pieces stacked and the wings kept the balance, and every time he bent, the small body shifted with the bend and braced itself, and neither of them made any comment on that at all.
By dusk he had a fire going and a pot of soup and no appetite. Liam still had not asked out.
Kaelen ate standing at the counter with his bowl in one hand. The light went off the hills. He washed the bowl and set it on the rack and stood looking at the window with the fire behind him and the cold coming in off the glass.
"You need out again?" he said.
"No."
"Be honest."
"I am."
"Liam."
"I'm being honest. I'll tell you if I need out."
Kaelen pressed his thumb to the outside of his throat. Under it the small shape leaned into the pressure and stayed leaned, and the purr came up without him asking for it, low and steady, an engine left running in another room.
"Bed," he said.
He went down the hall and lay on his side in the dark with the quilt over the wing. The moon was up early; the pale beam came in the north window and laid itself across the boards, long and thin, reaching toward the rug. He got his hand up over the pouch and left it there and shut his eyes.
The pressing started on the inside.
First the flat of a cheek, ground along the lining, slow. Then the brow, then the nose. Liam was working into the wall of him like a man pushing into a door that gave and gave and never opened. The tissue folded around each feature and held it, and the heartbeat came back up through it and into his brother's skull, and Kaelen felt every degree of it from the outside of the skin.
He did not say anything. There was nothing to say that would not end it.
He pressed back instead. Palm flat, fingers spread, following the slow track of the small body on the other side, feeling where the spine lay against him, from the base of the neck down to the small of the back. The hand outside and the face inside met through half an inch of living tissue, and the moonbeam crawled across the floorboards at the foot of the bed.
The purr rolled up out of him, from his chest, up the throat, into the pouch, and Liam stopped moving and let it take him. Kaelen could feel it arrive, could feel the small back go loose against the lining he had been grinding into a moment before. The palms went flat. The pushing stopped being pushing.
Neither of them moved. Not for the length of the rug. Not while the beam found the western timber and began its slow pale climb up the boards. Not when the fire in the other room dropped to coals and the house creaked once at the kitchen end, the way it always did.
Kaelen's hand stayed where it was, and the weight under his jaw stayed under his jaw, and he prepared himself to keep it there through the night, through tomorrow, and through the day after that if his brother asked, all the way to the door of that room, if it came to it.