Chapter Text
“Come on, come on…” Kendall mutters to himself, his cell phone squeezed between his shoulder and his ear as he fumbles through the steps of tying his tie. This is why he goes without one when he can get away with it; he can never get the tightness quite right to balance out the length, and all day the knot sits pressed up against his trachea like a knife blade to a hostage. And Rava’s text hadn’t helped—what the fuck was he supposed to make out of “Call soon. Serious, but nothing bad”? That could be about any number of things, several of which were probably worse than he was equipped to deal with. The only thing Kendall’s willing to rule out is an intervention, because she wouldn’t do that over the phone. Besides that, he’s in the fucking dark.
(Kendall has only ever been subject to one “intervention”, anyway, but Rava had wanted to keep the kids out of it, and Shiv and Roman cracked jokes the whole time, and Stewy didn’t show up, probably because it would have made him a fucking hypocrite, so it was just Kendall stuck in a room with Rava and the people who drove him to drugs, anyway.)
“Ken?” Rava’s voice ( finally ) blares through the speaker. “Are you at work? I don’t want to do this if you’re at work.”
“Yeah, hey, good morning,” Kendall grunts as he presses closer to his shoulder. “I’m on my way out. Figured I’d catch you before.” Nice and casual, like he hadn't wanted to slam his head against the wall the moment he saw the text. Rava hasn’t been exactly chatty with Kendall lately, only texting when it had to do with seeing the kids, and never a phone call. Certainly not one where he didn’t end up feeling like shit by the end of it.
“Okay, well, this isn’t exactly a quick thing—are you sure you don’t want to call back tonight?”
“You said it was important. Despite what you might think, Rava, I do actually give a shit when you say something is serious.” It’s a lot more biting than he intends it to be, he can tell, and she sighs, slightly stilted. Kendall gives his tie a stronger tug to clear his head and clarifies, “I’m here. So, I have time.” You know, despite the fact that he’s supposed to be at Waystar in less than half an hour, but he pays the driver to wait for him, so if he can’t get away it’s not really that big of a deal. “Are the kids okay?”
“They’re…” Rava trails off, and Kendall stiffens—this should not be a hard question to answer. “They’re doing better,” she continues. “That’s actually part of it, the news I wanted to tell you about.”
Better was good, although better than what, Kendall wasn’t really sure. He hadn’t really seen much of any of them since Shiv’s wedding, and even then half of it had been Rava urging him to hurry along the divorce proceedings. Lucky for her, he’d wound up with enough extra guilt and self-hatred after said wedding to go along with cutting himself out of their lives entirely and pinning himself instead to Logan’s side, where he couldn’t hurt anybody, or if he did then at least it wasn’t entirely his fault. He was more chilled out now, enough to regret the personal isolationism and actually try to, you know, make an effort. That’s what this call was—Kendall making an effort.
“How—how are you doing, then?” Kendall asks, because it’s only polite.
“I’m fine,” Rava answers quickly and simply. “Thanks, I guess. Are you…” She trails off.
“Yeah,” Kendall says. That’s probably the most they’ve asked after each other in two months, and now that formality’s out of the way.
“So.” Rava makes some tiny kind of throat-clearing noise, probably more nerves than anything else, but maybe Kendall’s projecting.
“Yeah, the—the news?” Kendall’s eyes cast listlessly around his bedroom, and his hands worry with the knot of his tie. Part of him wants to hang up, pretend the call dropped, throw the phone and run, but dread has pooled so heavy in his feet that he’s stuck in place to the floor. “What is it?”
“Okay, so,” Rava states in preface. “You know Iverson’s been having a tough time in school?”
“Yeah, sure.” Kendall nods loosely. “Is he going to transfer or something?”
“Well, the therapist I mentioned—”
“Oh, Jesus, this,” Kendall grumbles without thinking.
“Kendall.” Rava doesn’t sound angry, not yet, but it’s a warning.
“I just don’t think a kid should go to a shrink,” Kendall protests, like the response will be any different from the last time he made this point. “They’d tear him to bits, okay, you can’t just put a ten-year-old in a cage with a bear. It’s gonna fuck him up, stunt his growth or something.”
He can practically hear Rava pursing her lips on the other end of the line. “She hasn’t ‘torn him to bits’, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Kendall almost drops the phone, and has to let go of his tie to catch the thing and get it back to his ear. “You actually sent him? Jesus, he’s not—”
“Kendall, he begged me.”
“So? You give a kid something, just because he begs for it?”
“ Ken .” Rava’s voice cracks, and Kendall immediately shuts up. He was prepared for Rava to be cold, even angry, sure, but based on the ragged breaths from the other end of the line, she might actually be close to tears. This isn’t like her, not for years. The last time Rava cried was over one of his fuck-ups, and he’d tried to promise himself he’d never fuck up that bad again.
He waits until her breathing gets a little more steady, and then adds, “I’m still here. I’m… I’m listening.”
“You weren’t there, Ken, okay,” she says when she finally speaks again. “He was… he was hyperventilating, crying for more help, anything, because he… he talked about how much pain he was in, and he started—you know, one of his hitting episodes…”
Kendall’s gut drops like a poorly-thrown punch. He’s only ever been witness to one of Iverson’s said episodes, but it had been some of the most primal fear he’d ever felt. The kid he was supposed to care for—be better than his dad for— slamming his fists against his head, and, when Rava tried to hold him steady, against Rava, and he was screaming and Kendall didn’t know what to do, or have the courage to do anything but hold Rava while she cried and Sophie cried and Iverson cried. Kendall had felt sick for days. It wasn’t even something he’d done, so why had he felt like a worse father than ever?
“You…” He mulls over his words, trying to pick ones that will be soft enough on Rava and himself alike. “You can’t always get your hopes up that it’s going to fix things. Therapists are crackpots most of the time, and then it’s just like a big old, fucking, an exercise in misery.”
This isn’t totally 100% true—a few times, in rehab, he started to get it, at least in the one-on-one sessions. But those occasions were few and far between, and almost every other time he walked away feeling like shit. He shudders to think, as fragmented and messy as those memories may be, of the aborted Roy family therapy attempt at Connor’s ranch, even before he showed up with a bloodstream full of uppers, primed to tell it like it was. An exercise in misery, indeed.
“And even when it’s not, and it’s not a complete quack,” Kendall continues, “therapists, they can’t really… you know.”
“I know it’s not a solution to everything, but he’s feeling a lot better,” Rava presses. “And he doesn’t come home every day from school in tears. That’s more than we could say a year ago.”
Kendall’s jaw screws up tighter. He shouldn’t have called, not now, not in the morning when the world is still fucking him raw with how much of it there is. Maybe not ever, maybe he should have just pretended he hadn’t seen the text, but he wanted to be a good partner and look where that got him. He pushes a response out anyway. “I just don’t want him to be forced into anything he’ll hate us for when he’s older.”
“Well, I doubt that that’ll happen, because it was his idea, remember?” she chides him. “I think it’s really working for him, too.”
“So, what?” Kendall swallows, pacing around the bedroom in search of his laptop. “Did you call to gloat? Was that what was so important?”
“Kendall. I’m not gloating.” There’s movement on the other end of the line. Deliberate steps, a drawer opening and closing. “The therapist had a lot of insights, from what she was able to communicate with me. So there are… avenues we’re able to explore for him, and more options for him to choose from, now.”
“This isn’t—” None of this is explaining anything. Kendall holds back a couple of ill-advised snarky remarks (that are really less snark and more blunt-force strike) and opts instead for, “I still don’t know what that means.”
“I’m getting there,” Rava says, a slight waver in her voice. “She… she recommended a panel of testing for him.”
“Testing? Testing for what?” Kendall wrestles the knot out of the tie and flings it over the couch—he’s not dealing with that today. “He’s just a kid. He’s not—” His voice lowers instinctively, even though no one’s around. “He can’t be getting into any hard stuff yet. At his age he shouldn’t be able to get his hands on anything worse than a bummed Marlboro.”
“It’s—it’s not substances,” Rava cuts in. “And he’s eleven, so he’s not smoking, either, for your—” Silence, then a heavy, steady breath. “I know it runs in your family. I keep an eye out.”
Kendall feels the unspoken “ So they don’t turn out like you ”, and indignation boils in his gut on instinct, even though he knows there’s no real way to argue against it. He wants them to turn out like him less than Rava does. Even the “runs in your family” point is really just an attempt to cushion the blow—who else in the family had been shamefully shoved into a facility? Like, maybe Connor’s mom, but that wasn’t over drugs, she was just fucked up in the head. That was biological, probably, and besides, none of her was in Kendall’s bloodline. If anything, it should be Connor who’s bouncing in and out of rehab, but he’s just blowing cash on Napoleon’s nutsack or whatever, and Kendall was the fuckup bad enough for people to care about.
“Maybe testing wasn’t the right word,” Rava continues. “An assessment, he had an assessment. A psychological report.”
“He’s not crazy,” Kendall shoots back automatically, hackles raising. “Just, just because he has a hard time doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with him. Lots of people have a hard time in school.”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with him.”
“Well, you said it was serious,” he snaps, mildly aware that his pacing is growing erratic. “I’m waiting for the part that’s actually fucking serious.”
“They said he has—” Rava stops, recalibrates. “They diagnosed him with autism spectrum disorder.”
Kendall freezes, hand in the doorframe. His mouth is bone-dry, and he has to swallow a few times before he can make any sounds come out. “What?”
“I know it’s a lot to take in.” She probably doesn’t mean it to be patronizing, but annoyance crackles in Kendall’s chest anyway—of course it’s a fucking lot to take in. “I’m going to send you some of the resources the doctor gave us. There’s some articles, and a book by a man on the spectrum—it’s very informative.”
Kendall’s head is full of static. “You said nothing was wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong with him,” Rava stresses. “We’re just learning something new that we didn’t know before. That’s all.”
It sounds rote, rehearsed, like she’s just playing back for him what the doctor told her. Kendall wonders if she even believes it herself, or if she’s just saying what she’s supposed to say, repeating word for word in the hopes that will eventually feel sort of true.
Fuck, like he’s one to talk about that. But Rava doesn’t have life and death on the line, not like he does. Not going along with his dad isn’t just stupid or fruitless anymore, or even just dangerous. It only takes a moment’s lapse for Logan to shoot back some sardonic quip about how much drive he has, and Kendall is back in that fucking car, out of his body and blinking away rain that isn’t falling anymore.The details are fuzzy but the pressure in his chest is crystal clear, and Logan can sense it, hawklike and ready to strike. He always can, with any kind of instability, and it’s safe and secure under his wing. But if you accidentally slip away, the difference between family and prey gets harder to tell with aging eyes, and shit —
“You’re not going to tell my dad about this.”
The pause from Rava is ice and salt, burning against his ear. “That’s it? That’s your first response?”
“Well, Jesus, Rava, what the fuck am I supposed to say?” Kendall snaps. “It’s not like—do you think he’d be shooting fireworks out of his ass to hear that his grandson has some kind of mental problem—”
“Developmental disorder,” Rava clarifies, like there’s any real difference, at least to Logan. Her tone, though, chokes any protest from Kendall into silence—she’s steely and steadfast, cutting deep into him in the same way that, in another time, had made Kendall fall for her, when she knew what she saw and she liked it. Now, the blade is dull and it cuts too deep.
“Ken,” she pushes on sternly, to the point where he can hear her plastering on a strained smile, “this is a good thing. Now we know, right? We can get him the right kinds of help.”
“You keep saying it’s good now,” says Kendall. “It just—this doesn’t sound great, Rava.”
“Look, you want to be a part of his life, this is a part of it,” Rava says. “He’s your son, and this is how he is. This is how he’s always been.”
“So now he’s my son?” Kendall sputters. “When we’re together, he’s our son, and when I screw up he’s your son, but when there’s a disorder, he’s my son?”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
Kendall wants to scream. “I don’t know anything, do I? I barely know what’s going on with my own kids anymore, and now this huge thing happens—”
“Which is why I asked you to call me,” Rava finishes for him. “So you could know what’s going on.”
Kendall drags a hand across the back of his neck like the world’s worst massage. It doesn’t soothe him, of course. Why would it? He’s sinking, he’s lost, but Rava is technically right, she did ask him to call, and he did, so now he knows.
It should be good that he knows.
“I have to get down to the office,” Kendall finally rasps. “This was a—
“Do you think I’m not scared, too?” Rava’s voice has dropped to a conspiratorial hush. “I am. I’m scared shitless. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t change anything. But I don’t have a choice, because I love him, and the thing I want most in the world right now is to keep my children safe and happy. Okay?”
Kendall swallows. This is sounding very similar to that intervention.
“The driver’s waiting,” he manages.
“Fine. You want me to cut the bullshit?” Rava snaps. “I’m not going to say anything to Logan, because I don’t talk to your dad when I don’t have to. The fact that I’m telling you at all is me being nice. You know that clause in the custody agreement is in effect if you start using again. I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“I—you do, though,” Kendall fumbles. “We… I’m their dad. Those are my kids, I mean, I deserve something.”
“That’s not—” She breaks off again, her silence heavy. “It doesn’t matter. Because I am telling you. I think you should know, because it’s a big part of his life—I mean, it explains a lot. It helps, to put a word to it. I thought it could be useful for you.”
“What—what do you—” Kendall doesn’t even know why he’s stuttering. Childhood patterns coming back into play, just in time to make him feel like a poor excuse for an adult. “Useful how?”
“A goal?” Rava sighs. “Something concrete that you can try to work with. If it helps him deal with problems more accurately, don’t you think it could help us be better parents?”
Even through his own rising fervor, it is not lost on Kendall that Rava says “us”. He sits with that “us”, turning it over in his hands.
He must be silent for longer than usual, because Rava speaks again. “Ken? Still with me?”
He nods, even though he knows she can’t hear it, because it’s all he can do. “Uh, yeah,” he finally lets out. “You… you’ll send the stuff to me? The stuff from the doctor?”
“I’ll forward it once we get off the phone.” He can’t parse Rava’s tone, exactly. It’s not exactly happy with him, even though he’s pretty sure that was the right thing to do, to say, and that Rava would think so, too. But she’s not angry, either. Maybe he’d know if she was standing in front of him, but maybe not even then. Besides, the point is moot.
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll… I’ll get going then. Bye.” And while he’s still pondering whether or not he should say “I love you”, whether or not she’d say it back, Rava says goodbye and ends the call.
He holds the phone at his ear for a little while longer. His fingers feel numb, pins and needles creeping up through his extremities. The room keeps slipping in and back out of focus with every movement of his eyes.
Fuguelike, Kendall gathers the rest of his things and meets his driver down at the car. He does not say another word for the rest of his journey.
It’s an hour before he usually goes to lunch, and Kendall hasn’t done a damn thing besides looking busy. Of course, he’d been sat down in two different meetings, but his only job had been to nod and glance at his dad for approval. And now he’s just sitting in his dad’s office like a little kid in time-out. So it makes sense, really, that his mind wanders back to his talk with Rava earlier that morning.
Okay. Okay, this was real. Rava wouldn’t fuck around about something like this. Iverson was… Iverson had autism. Now what? What the fuck could he do? How could a man who couldn’t be trusted anywhere but squirreled away in Daddy’s office when the meetings were too important be trusted to ever take care of a special-needs son? How was he ever supposed to prove himself to Rava and the kids again now that the bar was so much higher? It was bullshit, it was hopeless. Why did life have to insist on wrapping its hands around his throat while it fucked him? His breath was closing in, tunneling his vision—life had some sadistic fucking kinks, and wouldn’t just settle for getting it over with.
Fucking—breathe. He forces some air through his nose. He’s alone, but the walls are glass, and he had to keep up at least the outside appearance of normalcy. He curls his fingers over the seat of his chair—he’s at the table on the opposite side of the room from his dad’s desk. It’s empty and yet still staring him down. Kendall thinks that if he even touches anything in here, it’ll set off a blaring alarm and zap him full of electricity, or riddle him with bullet holes, like in a spy movie, or an Indiana Jones.
He should look at his email. He should look at what Rava sent him. He should fucking try.
But if he’s going to do it here , in the office, at Waystar, he can’t just up and look at it. Even if nobody else is in the room, even if nobody is looking towards Dad’s office, the walls always have eyes, or ears, or whatever. Kendall glances out onto the office floor. Nothing of note from the cubicles. That’s a good start.
Pushing himself to his feet, Kendall paces the room, coming to a stop at the window, facing out towards the city skyline. There’s nothing interesting out there, but staring out at the old kingdom gives the impression of a pensive soul, rather than a haunted one. Besides, it’s then less suspicious for Kendall to sit down in a new spot before he pulls out his laptop, one that keeps his screen facing away from the office proper. He stifles his glancing around to a minimum as he searches through his inbox for Rava’s message.
The email is forwarded from some bullshit-sounding facility called “Promising Pathways”, and it’s a lot of fluffy stuff about acceptance and family-building, but at the bottom are the links that Rava promised, which will hopefully be more concrete, so he starts clicking.
There’s a few links to “mommy blogs” that make him want to throw up from the sheer amount of winding introductions and enduring positivity, and there’s some webpages and PDFs from an autism organization he’s never even heard of, which are dry but at least straightforward. He doesn’t really look for too long at any of the pages, though—he loves Iverson, really, but his eyes won’t let the words do anything but pulse in and out of periphery. Not that he wants to let everyone down by not reading and helping like he’s supposed to, but the words seem to worm their way into his stomach like a parasite if he lingers.
The last link is to the full text of a book, some guy’s memoir, and even though it’s the longest one, it looks the most promising. If Kendall’s going to make some kind of effort to understand, then a firsthand account is a good way to go, right? Less clinical and fussy. He opens up the file, skips through the foreword (because who reads the fucking foreword), scrolls down to the beginning of when the author actually starts talking, and prepares to force himself through at least a little of it.
Huh .
Kendall had expected the book to be more of a slog, another thing he just had to put up with for the good of his family, but… This is something he can understand. The guy writes in a way that’s easy to read quickly, and as it starts to go more into his experiences, he does have to admit that some of it sounds familiar—a lot like Iverson. Like, needing reasons for everything, no matter how small, why they’re going somewhere or when they’re leaving, or why he has to hug Grandpa even though Grandpa doesn’t ever seem happy to see him. Those were the kind of things Kendall himself had always just done without asking when he was Iverson’s age, because he had to, and that was that. But, he supposes, if their brains really are “wired differently”, as the book puts it, there’s some part of his son that won’t process that he has to, or doesn’t see why he should.
Which is… terrifying, honestly. Kendall doesn’t know all the things this is supposed to entail, but it sounds like kids with autism are sort of born without survival skills, basically. And if Iverson doesn’t have survival skills, then Kendall fucked up by making him a Roy. God knows how Kendall survived this long. God knows he’d tried not to.
Which, well, that’s a bleak thought. Kendall thoughtlessly knocks a weak fist against his jaw. If he wants to be a good dad, he can’t keep making it about himself. Rava was doing it, why couldn’t he?
He drags his eyes back to the page and keeps reading. The language is plain enough, regular enough, that he doesn’t feel talked down to, nor is it going over his head. That’s the surprising part, one that he knows he shouldn’t be surprised by, hates his own selfish presumption for being surprised by, but feels it nonetheless: it’s so… human .
Not that people with disorders aren’t human—hell, addiction is a disorder, right? Even when it makes him feel less than human—but, still, Kendall had expected a narrative that felt foreign, or sanitized, hoping to boost his spirits about Iverson’s diagnosis. But this book isn’t trying to give him anything he’s not there to take. It’s just laying it out there. That makes sense, Kendall considers, since one of the webpages from before had some bullet point about autistic people just saying what they mean. No games. Kendall could get used to that.
He inhales deeply, fingers flicking down the touchpad to scroll. The next chapter seems to be about growing up, or the guy’s parents, or something—Kendall kind of skims over the little intro once he gets the gist of it. This, this has got to be the one. This could be the key, the difference between being a proper, understanding dad, and, well, not being that, being worthy of cutting out of their lives. He shifts in his seat, cracking his knuckles under his chin, and starts on the part that details the man’s experience with his father.
And then suddenly he jerks back, adrenaline rocketing through his chest in a fumbling, queasy crash, like it would when he was in rehab and two different withdrawals would hit peaks at the same time. Just then, he’d heard the words on the page crystal clear in his head, and he’d heard them in his dad’s voice.
Look at me when you’re talking to me.
It was—too specific, too specific for not being a part of any particular memory at all. Kendall doesn’t remember any one day, or how old he would have been, or who else would have been there. And yet, the words clawed into his chest and hollowed him out, leaving behind a husk of a boy—of a man. Like he could try to reach through himself and find his hand met with nothing.
“Nothing”, “nothing”, that’s every other word out of your goddamn mouth! It’s not fucking nothing, so are you going to tell me what it is or are you going to keep being a smartass about it? Don’t lie to me, boy. I can tell.
Kendall’s head snaps up and he braces himself, for—something—but logic catches up pretty quickly, and reminds him that this is stupid, because he's currently alone in the glass-walled room. Barely daring to turn his head, he tries to do an inconspicuous, surreptitious sweep of the rest of the office—all of the other staff are engrossed in their work. None of them are looking at him. Logan is in a boardroom, on the other side of the building, oblivious to the tongue-lashing that Kendall just re-lived.
Fuck , this is stupid . Kendall slams his laptop shut and pushes it aside. Fuck the stupid fucking book.
Kendall doesn’t open his laptop again until late that night, by which time he’s forgotten that he left the damn page open. The shapes of the words pop up mockingly, and he recognizes them before he can even read them, synapses firing just enough for his hand to jerk almost spasmodically, slamming out the shortcut for Force Quit. The window vanishes from view and Kendall can breathe again.
It’s stupid. It doesn’t even make sense, really, that a couple of words could make him feel this sick. Like, there are other parts of the book that are way more of a bummer. The guy got bullied a bunch as a kid, really badly, and there’s probably way more stuff in later chapters that’s just as shitty, if not more. Looking at someone when you’re talking to them isn’t even a big deal.
Well, it can be for autistic people. He catches himself. It can be really overwhelming for them, especially when other things are going on—it had said that somewhere among the mountains of information he’d barely processed. But it’s not that way for regular people—people who aren’t autistic. Whatever. Being a kid is about listening so you can grow up and stay alive.
Kendall’s been working on that for his entire life.
When Kendall was younger, he learned that there was at least one field where he could outshine all his siblings: he wouldn’t cry. It didn’t come easily anyway, which shot him up leagues above, say, Roman , who cried like a fucking pussy locked in his room, like Dad didn’t know he was giving in to being a weak little baby (which, okay, maybe was a little harsh to say when Roman was eight, but by the time he was twelve he should have learned better), or even Shiv (who already had a built-in excuse for tears by being the actual baby and the girl). And, even when it did feel like Kendall could cry, he got good, pretty early, at holding it down.
When his chest got tight, he would run the inside of his bottom lip between his teeth, just the inside, where the bumps of vein and muscle would rumble in a snappy echo throughout his mouth, ricocheting up into the sides of his cheeks and to the back of his throat. The main drawback, though, was that if he wasn’t careful, his reckless teeth would bite down hard enough to draw blood, and he would have to choose between making a whole thing of it or just silently swallowing through the sharp, sour taste until the bleeding stopped. And, realistically, it was never actually a choice; Kendall would tuck the injured spot between the flattest teeth he could get it to, and he would suck at it until the lip was swollen inside his mouth, pressed flush to his bottom teeth, but, at least, bloodless.
One time, though, he was trying to get through a family dinner when the softness of his own mouth betrayed him and it ran full of blood. He thought he was doing a pretty good job hiding it, all things considered, until his mom casually cocked her head to advise him to stop making “that horrible slurping sound”.
He let the blood pool behind his lips after that. He didn’t even open his mouth to take another bite, not when he could feel his siblings watching him. Kendall was the oldest (minus Connor, who didn’t really count as a kid and was only their half-brother and didn’t live at home anymore anyway), and if the oldest broke and bled, then they’d all break, the family would fall apart. Kendall’s fault. He ignored Shiv’s wide eyes flicking between his face and their mom’s, and he ignored Roman’s suspicious gaze tracking Kendall’s fork as it pushed his asparagus around the plate without picking up any more.
He didn’t see them. He didn’t.
But, still he felt it. Even now, he tastes it.
That’s the thing about picturing it, the taste of acid and the give of shredded flesh between his teeth: it sets his jaw in subconscious motion, and Kendall only realizes his regression creeping into the present day when the sting starts to trickle down his throat. Goddamn it. He sputters, tries to swallow, but it half-chokes him, and he springs to his feet instead.
Mouth heavy and filling slowly with shame, Kendall dashes to his bathroom. He’s confronted by his own reflection, almost taunting him with the pallor of his cheeks and the redness of his eyes. Fuck off , he thinks, and flings the cabinet doors open so the mirrors can’t stare him down.
Drawing the puckered, broken lip deeper into his mouth, he sucks out as much blood as he can and spits pink into the basin. It oozes down the side of the sink, trailing its gore on the way down. Very Fight Club. That makes him feel a little better, even. Not so juvenile anymore.
No more thinking about the autism shit tonight, he tells himself, wiping saliva from the edge of his lip. Self-care, or whatever. Something Roman would call pussy shit, ask him if he was going to stay in with Legally Blonde and smear on a face mask and call Stewy and gossip together about boys. Joke’s on hypothetical Roman, he can’t call Stewy anymore without it being fucking weird. Just another consequence of trying to kill your dad only for the knife to turn back around on you. You step out of the path of its blade, but it still has to hit someone.
Whatever. He could still find a way to ease his pain. He picks up his phone, and texts not Stewy, but Greg. still got that hookup from before? Kendall hesitates, then bangs out a second message: or maybe some actual quality shit this time lol
Three dots, and then Greg’s response bubbles through. maybe? Give me like 5 to make some calls. This is quickly followed by: also is it weird to text about this? this is sort of technically a company phone so like maybe we should at least use code or smth?
just make the calls, Kendall types, ends it with a period for good measure, then tosses his phone onto the bed. Fucking Greg doesn’t even know the meaning of paranoia. Greg’s too fucking trusting. Kendall’s the one who sees the hawk around every corner and crouches like a field mouse.
Drug use often induces paranoia
, his memory provides, unhelpfully. It can shut the fuck up. He’s remembered enough stray comments today, and he’s not going to wait and see if any more of them will force him to relish in the taste of his own entrails.