"Bitter Things. A Grammar Lesson."
Part 1/1
By Mare J ([email protected])

Rating: PG
Distribution: Please ask.
Spoilers: Pretty much everything in season two is a fair game.
Summary: Brotherly love, family and such things.



The simple past is used to talk about a completed action in a time before now. Duration is not important. The time of the action can be in the recent past or the distant past. The simple present is used to express habits, general truths, repeated actions or unchanging situations, emotions and wishes.

*~*~*~*~*

He opens his mouth, maybe to scream, maybe to say something, anything.  And then he pauses--where the hell did all his words go?  Screaming has done nothing for him in the past, and whom exactly would he be screaming at anyway?

A stream of hot air rushes into his throat and he thinks he is burning inside. Maybe he is, and maybe it has nothing to do with the air. Everything around him vibrates and trembles and the ground under his feet shakes.

Dammit. He is wearing the wrong socks again. They are too old and worn-out. He was supposed to get rid of them but he must have forgotten and put them in the laundry basket instead of the trash. Tess probably washed them along with everything else; mainly his clothes, thank you very much, but she used to wear his shirts around the house and that's why she did his laundry. After she left he found a neat pile of folded t-shirts and socks on his bed.  He slept on the couch--force of habit, he thinks--and didn't even know it was there until Liz and Maria stormed in.  Liz insisted on going into Tess's bedroom, and he had to move the pile off the bed so that they could sit down.  

There is a hole in his right sock, right where his big toe touches insides of the boot, and he can feel tiny pieces of rock that somehow got in there--he's gonna get all kinds of blisters.  And it's all because Tess never threw anything away.  

He once told her that she reminded him of a racoon, but sometimes she didn't get his jokes at all, because she'd thought that he was talking about makeup left on her eyes and glared at him, one of her patented glares that could be read as either offended or defensive. It was, most likely, the mixture of both. Maybe, though, it was just a bad morning for jokes since apparently she'd finally gotten her wish and Max had made all kinds of declarations, which, of course, led to them sleeping together. Declarations always have ulterior motives. But she looked so damn lost when Evans had left and he really wanted to put a smile back on her face and couldn't think of anything nice to say. So he settled for something funny. Maybe calling her a racoon wasn't funny at all, just the best he could muster at the time.

His left side hurts, sharp needles of pain poking somewhere under his ribcage, but it doesn't really register until he feels Isabel's cold hand wrapping around his and pulling him forward. He remembers that Tess's hands were always warm. He realises that he is out of breath, which is probably caused by all the running. It explains the pain.  

Michael says that all of them can't possibly fit into Maria's car--not that he even wants to be squished with Evans, Isabel and Liz in the backseat, anyway. Normally Maria would say something about tact not being in Michael's vocabulary and Michael would give her his "what now?" look.  But Maria says nothing--she is the only one who seems to be holding back tears--and he calls his dad, leaves a message on his voice mail, wonders for a second where the hell could he be now, now that the rest of them are here, then tells the others that no, he doesn't need any company waiting. Still Isabel almost volunteers, and he almost tells her that he is not her charity case when she turns to him and even makes a step in his direction-- but almost is an operative word, because before anything comes out of her mouth Max looks at her, his lips moving, forming inaudible words 'mom' and 'dad'.

He sits down on a rock by the side of the road, closes his eyes, and pretends that he is waiting for his dad at the bus stop, like he did almost a year ago. Funny, he thought things were complicated then. He should probably move to the shade, or at least take his boots off and fix his socks, but he does nothing instead. Just sits there fully aware of the sunburn that he is most definitely getting. He squints his eyes, looks at the road. It looks like oil spilled on the asphalt, he can see the slick shimmer of it glimmering on the road's surface, and he knows that it's going to get even hotter. Already the air vibrates like the transparent haze above the fire.

The first question his dad asks when he arrives is--typical, it's never about him--"Where is Tess?" and he mumbles something incoherent about planet Vulcan or Mars, or some other idiotic joke-like truth. He figures that he can leave it up to Max, or Liz, or whomever, to explain what a bitch Tess really is.  After all, they have always been better at that sort of thing. When the half-smile on his dad's face changes from hopeful to slightly forced he suddenly remembers how her face fell when he'd told her that she was like a sister to him and how he'd instantly felt that he said something wrong, but there wasn't enough time and besides, he was too angry.

Now he is too tired to be angry and doesn't want to dwell on why there is guilt mixed in with exhaustion.

Maybe he is a little afraid to think about that.

They don't talk in the car, and it's strange--after Tess threw her hissy-fit on Christmas he got used to doing more talking and less watching tv. After the big fiasco of Guerin's foray to Las Vegas, after his dad was done yelling at them in the car, Tess told him about Liz's exchange with the security guard. They laughed at what a pathetically bad liar Liz was and he noticed his dad fighting a smile in the rear-view mirror.  No, he doesn't want to think of that either--Tess turned out to be a pretty damn good liar herself--and again for some stupid reason he feels almost guilty, and he doesn't even want to know why.

He falls asleep and wakes up in his own driveway, his empty house staring him in the face. He gets out of the car, mumbles something and nods when his dad tells him that he has to go to the station. Big surprise there. Not. He doesn't turn around to see him driving off in the general direction of Evans' house. He doesn't have to; he knows that that is where his dad is going first.  

Some things never change.

Inside, he goes straight to the bathroom and takes a shower. Afterwards, he drops a few wet towels on the floor, steps on them, and almost puts toilet seat down. Tess liked to holler about that. He leaves it up. When he is out in the hallway, he hears the soft thud of it falling back on to the toilet. Tears shoot right out of his eyes then and he slides onto the floor shaking and sobbing.  His naked ass makes a slapping sound when it hits the hardwood floor.  Pathetic all the way around.  

Later he makes himself get up and go to the bedroom, his bedroom. He makes sure not to look in the mirror, half-embarrassed half-afraid of the face that it might reflect.  He stays there in his room, pretends that he is sleeping all day and all night, and actually falls asleep a few times. He doesn't come out when his dad comes home, growls about not being hungry and hopes that the closed door muffles the sound of his voice enough to hide the lump that seems to be permanently stuck in his throat.

*~*~*~*~*

By the end of the week he can tell what time it is by what's on tv; not that he particularly cares about time. He watches shows, one after another from morning till late afternoon, to the point that he's almost hooked on some of them, and the days go by faster and faster. He has never actually had to spend a whole summer in Roswell before, but among other things he forgot was the deadline to apply for the football camp, and he missed enough practices (and games) during the season for the coach not to care about him anymore.

His dad comes home early at first, but that only lasts a day or two, and then he falls back into his routine.   When his dad comes home Kyle usually stays in his room or goes outside, wanders around, tries to stay away from anywhere he can run into them.  He knows that it won't last very long and his dad is going to look him in the eyes say, "Kyle, I need to know what happened," but he wishes it would happen later rather than sooner.

Actually, he wishes it would never happen, but he knows that never as well as forever are relative terms.  

*~*~*~*~*

He notices the dishes on Saturday, probably because there is nothing on tv. He eats his breakfast--it's really lunchtime, but he only woke up an hour ago--in the kitchen instead of taking it to the living room. He looks at the stuck of dishes in the drying rack--pretty soon his dad will start getting on his case about washing the dishes after himself --and realises that they are their old dishes, their pre-Tess dishes, mostly plastic food containers and a few plates with chipped sides. He's been using them all week but hasn't really noticed. He has hard time paying attention to anything, really.

Tess pulled out their good (and therefore unused for years) plates from the boxes in the garage--he didn't even know, or maybe he knew but forgot, they were there--some time in February.  She said that they were nice and she was sick of eating off crappy plates and then she started with one of her happy-homemaker rants and he turned to the wall, because he knew he was smiling an idiotically happy smile.  She wasn't even that much of a homemaker though he had never told her that. She only really cooked maybe two or three times and mostly they ate something pre-made, or pre-baked, that they picked up in the grocery store, but it was just fine by him and, in any case, better than what he was used to.  

He looks in the cupboards, in the kitchen cabinets, even under the sink, but the dishes are gone.  He isn't quite sure why he does it, but he goes to the garage and finally finds them neatly packed in the box; there is even a layer of dust covering it. A weeklong layer of dust, but it seems just as thick as the layer covering his bike that hasn't been touched in years.  He doesn't unpack the dishes, goes back to the house and into the kitchen and notices that the third chair that his dad brought from the office is gone too. He goes to his bedroom and gets "Mindfulness with Breathing: A Manual for Serious Beginners." off the bookshelf, lies on the bed and opens it to a random page.

When he was six years old he went to Florida with his mother, just the two of them. He doesn't remember why his dad couldn't (wouldn't?) come. Probably work, and wasn't it always the reason? It was before them.

They stayed in somebody's condo--he doesn't remember if it was one of his mother friend's or simply a rental-- almost right on the beach and he was afraid of seagulls and refused to come out to the balcony.  His mother worked in the school library but no one would remember her now.  She was just a temp--his dad said once that she has been a temp all her life, whatever he meant by that--and nobody ever remembers those.

His mother brought two of her good dishes with her--he doesn't think that they were called good dishes then, just dishes, they used them at home all the time-- she said she liked to feel at home wherever she went. She also brought a bunch of little knickknacks with her and put them all over the condo. It made her feel like she belonged, she said. A day before they were going back home, his mother packed the knickknacks away, said that she didn't want them to miss this place too much, and that 'a day with packed suitcases should do the trick of turning this stay back to just temporary'.  He didn't know what temporary meant then, but he liked the word and he remembers running around the suitcase she put in the middle of the living room and singing tem-pa-pa-pa-rra-rreee-pa-pa-pa-rro-rreee.

His mother left--for good--a few months after they came back.  It was right before Christmas and that Christmas was the first one he ever spent at his grandparents'. He didn't like his grandfather at all. He didn't really like anybody after his mom left for a very long time.

He wakes up because the corner of the book is poking him in the chest. He realises that the afternoon has gone by and his dad will be home soon. He should probably go.  

*~*~*~*~*

Where does the time go?

He decides to do something useful for a change on a Wednesday--he knows the weekly tv grid by heart. He watches soap operas now too and also does a great job at avoiding his dad. He's started to think that maybe his dad doesn't mind as much as he did last week. Or maybe it was a week before.

He goes to the grocery store and he is at the cereal aisle choosing between chocolate crap and marshmallow crap for breakfast when he hears Isabel's voice. His heart sinks so low that he can feel it beating somewhere near his stomach.

"Max, you can't do that. You can't treat him like � it's just us now, just us, Max, don't you get it?"

"I just�just want him to be careful," Max's voice always sounds hushed, but now there is a low whispery whistle to it, as if something in his throat is broken and words cause pain, scratching,  "We don't know what it can do to Maria's body."

Kyle wishes he could still laugh at Max or Michael's problems.  He can't, and he just wants to get out of there before they notice him, and before he hears more.

"You can't expect them to listen to you, not after� I can't lose him, or you�"

He is walking fast, then faster away, "�not again," he can't handle it, not now and he hopes that "�like a brother to us�" is something that he imagines, that she is too far from him for those to be her real words and now he is practically running.

How far can you run when it's 107 degrees outside?

Not very damn far and he pauses before the doors of the Crashdown.

"You've gained weight. Not that much, don't worry, jock-boy, you still got potential." Maria has about the same idea about tact as Michael. "Are you coming inside or what? My shift started, like, five minutes ago." She slaps his back, pushes him inside, and he notices dark circles under her eyes. She doesn't look as happy as she should if what Evans duo was talking about is true. Then again, maybe Guerin is just as much of an idiot as his high commander. No way in hell he is going to ask.

He watches how Michael's face lights up when he sees her and how Maria's doesn't, or does but not quite as much as his, not even as much as it used to before. He remembers how his house used to be laced with sexual tension when Tess first moved in, how everything inside his body vibrated when she was near.  Maybe, he should've slept with her, maybe then� but he couldn't and deep down he never really wanted to. Never, of course, being a relative term.

In all honesty, he might've for a very short while, but it somehow became less or maybe it turned into something different, and being the dumbass that he is, he never realised how dangerous she (it?) was. He sits at the counter and thinks if he should order something. Michael and Maria are fighting again, or maybe they are just talking.  It's hard to tell.

"Nothing, you wouldn't understand. It's a family thing." A pause. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry, it's just� It's Sean. With Alex and Te�"

They are standing not too far from him, behind the counter, and Maria suddenly turns to him her eyes apologetic and shinning, maybe she does know something about tact, after all.

Their conversation becomes barely audible, but not for long. Quiet is not in either of their vocabulary, that's for sure.

"Don't call him a loser, Michael, just don't.  He's family; you don't really get much of a choice here. I didn't exactly see you disowning Isabel for her Vilandra-gig either. Besides, he did it for Liz, she still hasn't called him, you know. And it's not his fault that deputy, " it sounds like she snorts, "sheriff Hanson decided to go back on his word and report that stupid break and entry."

Michael says something about his dad, Kyle hears his last name, but he is almost at the door then. He feels--now familiar--pounding in his temples and pain under his ribs, thinks that he fucking hates this weather and that he is so out of shape.  His left side hurts and he wasn't even running. He goes back to the grocery store, makes sure that they are gone, and gets Kellogg's with red berries and no added sugar for breakfast.

*~*~*~*~*

His grandfather has a stroke on a Monday. He doesn't hear the phone ringing, because his tv is too loud and he never gets any phone calls, not the ones he wants to answer anyway. It's a few hours later that he notices a little red light flashing on his answering machine. He can't even remember which button to press right away and erases half of the message. He hears unconnected words, "�pital, room 305...Cardio-vascular ward�he's ok now�Albuquerque�"

His dad must be speaking on his cell-phone and the noise on the background makes transmission shittier than usual.  It takes almost forever for him to get to the station and get his dad's car, which looks oddly out of place in the empty parking lot of the station.  It takes him longer than that to get to the cardiac care ward of the hospital in Albuquerque.

He thinks about Alex for the first time in months when he walks through the sliding doors of the hospital. He remembers Alex with Liz and Maria when Liz's grandmother was alive.

He doesn't expect to see his grandfather awake when he finally finds his ward. He really doesn't expect his grandfather's first words to be, "Where is your sister, did you call your sister?"

He stops and just stares until his dad explains that his grandfather means his aunt Jill. And that his grandfather thinks that Kyle is his father.  

"He's not really thinking straight, Kyle," his father says, and there is that whistling whispery noise that he's heard in Max's voice before.

He doesn't remember what his aunt looks like. His father hasn't spoken to her in years but there are postcards that always come from her on Christmas and on his birthday. She signs them Gale. He once asked his dad why.  His dad muttered that she didn't like her real name and that was that. When she called once a long time ago, his dad didn't offer to let Kyle talk to her, and he called her Jill.  

He vaguely remembers that his grandmother, when she was still alive and he was about eight years old, telling his father that Jill was the only sister he had and she was the only relative that he would ever have after they--his grandparents--were gone.  His dad never really answered that either, just walked away.

He tells his dad to go and that he will stay. He says, "Dad, you need to get some rest."

His father says that he will be back in a few hours, that he'll bring some food. When he walks out of the room Kyle hears him dial a number and then, "Gale, is that you?"

His grandfather falls asleep and Kyle sits beside him on a very uncomfortable hospital chair. He doesn't turn the tv on.  He dozes off about an hour later.

He dreams of a spring day, and Tess.  He tells her she is his sister. He knows that sometimes tenses are important. He yells at her, asks her to explain how could she do something so fucked up. How could she hurt him like that? In the dream he realises that she was the one who stood by him when his dad got screwed over by Sorenson. He realises that she wanted him with her when she went to Las Vegas. He waits for her answer. He doesn't let anybody tell him to go away. In his dream he knows that family is something that you don't get to choose but always choose over two girls with broken hearts and a guy who meant almost nothing to you.

He wakes up with a cramp in his neck and pain in his left side. The room is dark except for the eerie greenish glow of the streetlights seeping through the window.  His grandfather looks peaceful and his chest rises and falls in the even intervals of breathing.

Kyle knows that he wasn't running this time or anytime. It was his heart aching all along.

*~*~*~*~*

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material  - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The End