Chapter Text
Yancy is still awake when he hears the lock on the front door turn, the distinctive snick sound seems to echo in the stillness. He’s sitting in his bed, propped up by a mound of down pillows and legs warm under the quilt, the reading glasses he denies owning are low on his nose and his tablet in one hand. A late winter storm is kicking up a fuss outside the thick windowpanes, freezing rain tinkling against the glass. It’s just gone three am, and there are quiet footsteps on the carpet in the hallway, a shadow growing just beyond the open bedroom door.
Yancy isn’t worried, he knows who will cross the threshold. He knows every shape and sound his brother makes.
The light is low, too low for reading, a point Raleigh might make on a different day, but tonight, this morning, he just crosses the room in silence, hardly more than a shadow as he crawls up onto the bed. The cold clings to his sweater, to his flannel pants, to his hair, disheveled and mussed, and to the curve of his face, pale and solemn.
Yancy folds down the quilt and holds out his arm, murmuring little platitudes as Raleigh slumps against his side, cheek pressed to the curve of Yancy’s neck. He’s shivering, almost imperceptibly, and Yancy draws the blankets up around his shoulders, tucking the corners around him.
“Yance,” Raleigh says, raw and mournful, and Yancy moves his hand to card through the mess of blond hair, cradling the back of Raleigh’s skull, keeping him close, as though the younger man might contemplate moving.
“I know,” Yancy says. And he does. There’s a phantom pain that has been climbing up from his hip since the sun went down, fingers ghosting across his ribs when the clock rolled to midnight, to March 1. It’s the sixth March 1 of his new calendar, the sixth March 1 he should never have seen, by some accounts.
They don’t speak after that. There have never been words strong or wide enough to carry the meaning that simple touch conveyed so perfectly.
I almost lost you.
And, more importantly,
I’m still here.