Work Text:
It wasn’t like nightmares were uncommon in the Curtis household.
Ponyboy’s were a regular occurrence, and even Sodapop had one every few weeks. While he didn’t wake up kicking and screaming like their youngest, Darry could always tell if he had one the next morning by his uncharacteristically tense posture. Whenever they had been able to convince Johnny to sleep over, it wasn’t an unusual sight to see him wandering aimlessly through the living room in the dead of night, either.
Darry had never dealt with nightmares before- not real ones, anyway. He’d had some normal ones as a child, but once Soda and Pony came along he outgrew them. Nowadays, he was too tired to even dream at all, always asleep before his head had even hit his pillow.
Well, his father’s pillow.
But everything had changed once, and then it had changed again. Who’s to say that couldn’t happen a third time?
At the very least, that’s what Darry was thinking as his eyes shot open, heart pounding in the silence of his room- no, his parents’ room. Darry only ever broke the things he owned. He knew that nothing would be the same after that awful week in August, but he hadn’t been expecting . . . well, this.
It happened the next night, too- and the night after that. Nightmares quickly became a habitual disturbance to the little rest he could get, but unlike Pony, Darry remembered them every single time. They weren’t pretty. Mangled corpses, disappointed parents, gravity overtaking Dallas Winston the second he wasn’t alive enough to fight it anymore. The look of terror in his kid brother’s eyes the moment before he fled from the one person who was supposed to protect him, to keep him from harm.
If Ponyboy hated him now, Darry knew it was because he deserved it.
He hoped no one noticed how tired he was now, or if they did, he hoped they just attributed it to all the extra shifts he was taking to cover Pony’s hospital bills. Bills he never should have had to pay in the first place, but that now fell entirely on his shoulders. He regretted almost every decision he ever made, but the one choice he remained steadfast in was the one to take in his brothers. With that strength and that strength alone, he continued to drag himself out of bed every morning and act like nothing was wrong.
Everything was wrong, and it was all his fault.
He made Ponyboy run. He made Johnny kill that Soc boy. He made the church fire happen. He made Johnny die. He killed Dallas. All of it as permanent as if it were done with his own two hands. If these nightmares were his penance, he’d be glad to never get a full night’s rest again.
But that wasn’t what Ponyboy thought.
Darry was doing a fine job of hiding it to anyone else, he was sure, but Pony wasn’t just anyone. Not only was he Darrel’s little brother, he had chronic night terrors. He knew what to look for, because he would hide them if he could, too.
He should have seen it sooner, but he was so preoccupied- and really, it did seem like Darry was just tired from all those extra shifts at first. Maybe he was better at hiding things than he thought . . . or maybe Pony just didn’t know Darry like he thought he did. He’d changed, after all. Ever since their parents died, he’d become closed off to them, to everyone. And honestly, even though Pony knew now that his brother loved him, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all his fault. Soda worked, at least, to support them, and he smiled and laughed and made people happy. All Ponyboy did was mouth off at the wrong times and make people die. Did Darry somehow, so wrongly, think the same way about himself? Was that why he was pulling away from them?
Regardless, Darry couldn’t be doing this. Not when it was so clearly Ponyboy’s fault. And since Ponyboy was so obviously the one who messed everything up in the first place, he knew it was up to him to fix it.
Sodapop had known those two were off for weeks now. The changes had been slow, but recognizable to someone like him who’d known his brothers for nearly two decades. Plus, even if he didn’t pick up on the subtle clues, Ponyboy had started calling out Darry’s name in his sleep. The problem with the kid never remembering his dreams, though, was that Soda could never tell if the terror in his voice was for his big brother, or because of him.
He felt the tension in every moment- in the scraping of forks against old, chipped plates, in the passive-aggressive folding of laundry that slowly transformed into careless heaps thrown onto their shared bed, in the laughter that no longer reached either of his brothers’ eyes.
It was getting harder for Soda to keep smiling through it all, too.
It pained him to be away from the only family he had left, but hospital bills were expensive and Darry just couldn’t do it all by himself. Not for lack of trying, though; god only knew that Superman’s kryptonite was asking for help.
Then again, Soda thought to himself, maybe it runs in the family.
It hadn’t skipped Sodapop either, as he was all too aware. Ever since his breakdown after that horrible week, he’d been shoving it back down, afraid to lose his temper again. He couldn’t be ungrateful, not when everyone was trying so hard just to hold everything together. He knew he’d explode again, and then shove it all in, and then rinse and repeat. That was just the way it was with him, but it all came to a head far sooner than he thought it would have.
It started with Ponyboy screaming and thrashing in the night again, keening out for his brothers.
Soda, having had a nightmare the night before, was already fraying at the edges, but he would always be there for his little brother, and even if it took more out of him than usual, tonight was no different. Thankfully, Superman seemed to have heard his cries for help, since he came running in even sooner than usual. Sodapop wanted to collapse upon the relief of seeing him. He looked like the first light of a new day right up until he got closer and Soda saw, for the first time, the full extent of his exhaustion. Darry was always moving around, so while the eyebags were there for everyone to see, no one had ever been able to take a real look at them. His sunken cheeks looked hollower than usual, somehow, too. But Soda didn’t have too much time to dwell on Darry, since they were both so busy with Ponyboy.
The nightmare must have been uniquely horrible, because Pony begged their eldest to stay with him. Darry’s heart must have broken when he decided to stay, because Soda’s did too, and he wasn’t even the target of those pleading eyes. After that, he almost managed to sleep, too. Just as he felt his body unconsciously relax and his entire being seemed to tip forward into the bed he was laying on-
-he heard a quiet, sharp intake of breath. One that was far too deep, too guttural to have come from Ponyboy. Soda’s eyes shot open with a snap and a sinking feeling in his gut. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong, and he knew it.
Doing his best to not wake Pony, who had finally managed to get back to sleep, he rolled over and sat up.
Ponyboy woke up to hushed arguing above him. At first, he thought he was dreaming again, because those voices sounded like Soda and Darry’s, and they never argued, at least not right in front of him. But as he listened harder, he knew he couldn’t have been dreaming. He couldn’t have been making this up, even with his overactive imagination, because it sounded like Darry wasn’t arguing back. In fact, Ponyboy didn’t hear him saying anything at all. But it was definitely him Soda was talking at.
“Something is wrong, Dar, and I ain’t letting you weasel outta telling me.”
“It ain’t a big deal, Pepsi, really-“
“No! It is a big deal! You’re hauling roofing onto the tops of houses and I know you ain’t getting as much to eat as you should already, and I swear to god if I get a call one day that you fell off the roof and you’re in the hospital what the fuck do you think I’m gonna do, huh? I ain’t making enough at the DX to support Pony on my own, and even if I was, there ain’t no way in hell I could do this without you.”
“ . . . don’t say that, Soda. You’d figure it out.”
“I wouldn’t. You know I wouldn’t, not without you there to cover our asses.”
Darry stayed silent. Soda heaved a great sigh.
“I know what you told Two-bit,” he admitted.
Darry stiffened. When he spoke next, the fear in his voice made Ponyboy’s heart drop into the core of the earth.
“What did he tell you.”
It almost reminded Pony of that night, the one where it all went wrong.
“He told me you said it was your fault that everything happened. That you think-”
Soda’s breath hitched.
“-that you think you’re the reason they’re gone now.”
“That ain’t true.”
“Two wouldn’t lie about this, Dar, and you know it.”
“He steals all the time, but you draw the line at him lying?”
“Don’t you talk that way about him, you know that-”
“Would you two please stop?” Ponyboy broke his silence, unmoving, facing away from his brothers.
Darry was sure that if he wasn’t just as horrified as Sodapop, he’d be laughing at the expressions on their faces right now. How much had Pony heard? Hell, how much had Soda heard? Darry got that he was in over his head, he really did, but his kid brothers were the last people who needed to know that. If they figured out how much he was really falling apart, it would be over for them, because if one more person talked to him with that stupid sympathetic look in their eyes he might just snap again and make yet another mistake he couldn’t take back.
“Darry, I think we both know whose fault this is. It’s-”
“It’s my fault, Pony. If I hadn’t hit you that night-”
“If I hadn’t fallen asleep in the lot like a fucking idiot-”
“I know it’s me you keep dreamin’ about, Ponyboy, and I-”
“-I don’t think you know my dreams like I do.”
“But I know mine, Pone.”
And there it was. That was what had been wrong for the past few weeks. The final piece clicked into place for Sodapop, and without a second thought he voiced the realization.
“ . . . you’ve been having nightmares, too.”
The silence that followed was so thick that Pony could’ve sliced it open with Two-bit’s old switchblade. Tersely, as if he were admitting defeat after a hard-fought battle, Darry nodded. Tears gathered in Ponyboy’s eyes.
“And they’re about-”
“I think you know what they’re about,” he whispered, averting his eyes and resting his chin on one knee. Soda had never seen his big brother look so small.
“No,” Pony breathed, “No, no, no, Darry, please, no. You can’t blame yourself for this.”
Suddenly, Soda felt like he did two months ago, when Ponyboy and Darry refused to stop dragging him into their arguments. Somehow, even though they were both trying to push the blame onto themselves and not each other, it suffocated him in the same way it had before. He hadn’t even noticed he’d been crying until long after the silence once again permeated the room, when Darry slowly brought his hand up to wipe at the tear tracks on his younger brother’s face.
“Please don’t cry, Pepsi,” he begged, “I can’t take it anymore.”
Darry collapsed into sobs, drawing further into himself. Then Ponyboy’s lower lip started to wobble, and he collapsed into his oldest brother’s side.
“I’m sorry!” he wailed, “I’m so sorry, Darry!”
And then Darry looked at him, and his eyes were so lost that Soda couldn’t not wrap his arms around them. For a moment, they just stayed there, Soda holding his two brothers together and feeling like he was splitting apart. But then, he felt Darry’s strong arm on his back, supporting him, with Pony’s following suit. It would take a long time for them to stop crying into each other, and even longer for them to break apart.
“Please don’t let me lose you,” Soda found himself saying, “Please don’t let me lose you guys again. I can’t lose you guys again.”
“You won’t,” Pony started to say, but Soda cut him off.
“I already am. Every day you go further into your own heads, both of you, and I don’t know what to do. Y’all ain’t gonna tell me what’s wrong, and ya ain’t telling anyone else, either. Please. I don’t- I don’t want you to end up like Dally did.”
Ponyboy gasped sharply, but Sodapop couldn’t stop.
“We were all fucked up when he died, but I don’t think he would’ve done- what he did, ya know? I don’t think he would have done it if he knew that we were there too. Really there. And you two, you keep forgetting about the world around you- you’re gonna end up like him! Y’all are gonna kill yourselves one day because you can’t even look at each other anymore! And then- then what will I do? We’re all we have left. You’re all I have left.”
“I’m sorry,” was all Darry could find it in himself to say, “I’m so sorry.”
Soda sighed.
“It’s late, guys,” he said, glancing at the clock, “Or . . . early, I guess. I know you have work tomorrow, Dar, and I want you to have energy for it. Do you promise that if we all go to sleep now, we’ll talk tomorrow?”
“I promise,” Darry whispered, and Soda knew he meant it.
“Tomorrow morning, then.”
But Ponyboy had one more thing to say.
“ . . . I love you guys. I don’t think I tell you that enough.”
“We love you too, Pone.”
“We love you more than anything.”