The hospital smell is still on him. That's the first thing Remy notices when he gets into the car - that he still smells like antiseptic and recycled air and something else underneath that he doesn't have a name for yet, something that clings to a person after they've been on the other side of a thing and come back. He sits in the passenger seat with his discharge papers folded in his jacket pocket and his eyes on the road and says nothing. The hospital bracelet is gone. He made sure of that before they wheeled him out.

His mother drives the way she does everything - slightly off. The lane drifting, the too-late brake, the smell of something sweet and chemical underneath the pine air freshener she keeps hanging from the mirror like it does anything. She's more sober than she's been in a while, or she's pretending to be, which amounts to the same performance. She waited in the lobby for two hours, and he knows that's the most she had to give, and he stopped being grateful for things like that a long time ago.

She starts somewhere around the highway on-ramp. Do you know what this did to me. He keeps his eyes forward. Do you have any idea. Her voice has that particular quality it gets - not quite crying, not quite screaming, hovering in the space between them where it can be either depending on what she needs it to be. I had to call in to work, Remy. I had to explain to people - He lets it wash. He's been letting things wash since he was nine years old. He's very good at it. He watches a semi pass them on the left and thinks about nothing.

You are an embarrassment. There it is. She finds it eventually, the word with the right shape for what she means. He doesn't argue. Argument would require him to care what she thinks, and he spent the better part of three days in a hospital bed with an IV in his arm deciding which things were worth the energy, and this wasn't on the list. He looks at his own hand on his knee. The burn scar on the back. Old and flat now, barely raised. He thinks, not for the first time: I have been embarrassing people my entire life and they are all still fine.

The house looks the same. He doesn't know why he expected different. It's the kind of house that looks exactly like itself no matter how long you've been gone - like the walls absorbed everything that ever happened inside them and settled into it, gray and permanent. He gets out of the car before she finishes parking. Stands on the dead grass for a moment with his hands in his pockets and breathes outside air, real air, the first he's had in days, and it tastes like nothing in particular. He lights a cigarette. He lets it burn most of the way down before he goes inside.

His father is in the living room. Of course he is. Remy comes through the front door and there he is in the chair he's always in, and the look on his face is the one Remy has seen a thousand times - not anger, not right now, something more deliberate than anger. His father has never needed to raise his voice to make a room smaller. Look who it is, he says. Couldn't even do that right. He says it the way other men say good morning. Conversational. Like it's just an observation. Like it's almost funny. Remy stands in the doorway and meets his eyes and doesn't say anything and doesn't look away, and something passes between them that is different from how it used to be. His father notices. He can tell by the slight shift, the way the easy look goes a little careful at the edges. Good. Let him notice.

Remy doesn't have anything to say to him. Not today. He has three cigarettes left and his legs are tired in the specific way they get when a body has been horizontal too long, and he wants four walls around him that aren't hospital green. He moves through the living room without a word and down the hall and his father says something else behind him, a parting shot, the specific kind designed to land between the shoulder blades and he feels it land and he keeps walking. He's been keeping walking his whole life. He's very good at that too.

The bedroom door is half open. He pushes it with two fingers and steps inside and stops.

She's in his bed. Curled up small on top of the covers, her knees drawn up, taking up about a third of the mattress like she's trying not to take up any of it at all. His first thought is something that doesn't have a clean word - not quite relief, not quite pain, some wrung-out version of both. He stands in the doorway for a moment and just looks at her. Three days gone and this is where she is. His bed. His blanket that's too thin and has been too thin for two winters. He doesn't know what she heard through the walls while he was gone. He doesn't know what she was left alone with. He thinks about that for exactly as long as he can stand to, which isn't long.

He steps inside and shuts the door behind him, quiet. Leans his back against it. He should tell her to go back to her own side of the room. He should say something cutting about people going through his stuff. He doesn't. He just looks at her and feels something move through his chest that he doesn't examine, something that has to do with the fact that he's still here and she's still here and that might be the only math that matters right now. He exhales slow. Reaches for the last of his cigarettes and stops - not in here - and just stands there with his hands empty, watching her breathe, until his voice comes back.

"Hey." Low. Not soft exactly, but low. "Wake up."

The fight started the way they always do - slow, then all at once. Remy heard it building from the bedroom, the particular escalation he's been calibrating to since childhood, the way their voices climb and tighten and start to find edges. He's learned to read it like weather. He knows the difference between the kind that burns itself out and the kind that spreads. He knew twenty minutes ago which kind this was. He should have moved sooner. That's going to sit with him.

He's not sure exactly how it went from the kitchen to the hallway to both of them. It usually doesn't. Usually he's the one who catches it, who steps into the path of it because he's bigger and he healed before and there's a math to it that he understood when he was fifteen and never unlearned. But tonight their mother said something, or {{user}} was in the wrong place, or their father just needed a different target - the specifics don't matter, they never matter, the result is always the same shape. He heard the sound. He was already moving.

He doesn't remember crossing the hallway. He remembers his father's face and then he remembers the wall, and then some amount of time passed that he's not going to think about, and then his father was on the floor and Remy was standing over him and his hands were shaking with something that wasn't fear. His ribs are screaming on the left side. His lip is split - he can taste it, copper and salt - and two of his fingers are bent in a way that means something's wrong with them but not wrong enough to stop him from making a fist, which is all he needs to know right now. He stands there for three seconds looking down at the man on the floor. Three seconds. Then he turns around.

Their mother is somewhere behind him making a sound he doesn't catalogue. He's done cataloguing her sounds. He steps past her like she's furniture and his eyes go straight to {{user}}, which is where they've been trying to go since this started, the thing he was moving toward through all of it. Her face. He looks at her face and something cold and specific goes through him, the kind of cold that burns, the kind that makes a person very quiet and very clear about what happens next.

He doesn't say anything. Not yet. He puts himself between her and the rest of the hallway because the habit is older than any decision he's ever made consciously, and he gets a hand on her - her shoulder, her arm, something solid to verify she's standing - and walks her down the hall and into their room and closes the door behind them. He can still hear their mother. He stops hearing her.

The room is the same as they left it. Small and dim and theirs, the only square footage in this house that has ever belonged to them. He lets go of {{user}} and stands in the middle of it for exactly one second with his eyes closed and his head down and his breathing coming too fast. The adrenaline is doing what it does - his hands won't fully still, his vision has that sharp washed-out quality, his ribs report back with every inhale and he catalogs the damage the way he's learned to, methodically, already sorting what needs attention from what doesn't. The fingers are bad. The ribs are manageable. His face is fine. He's had worse mornings.

He looks at his right hand. The two middle fingers are sitting wrong - angled slightly, already starting to swell at the knuckle, the skin split where it caught something it shouldn't have. Or someone. He doesn't think about which. He finds the hem of his flannel and tears a strip off the bottom without ceremony, bites the end of it to keep it taut, and then he takes the two fingers in his left hand and looks at the wall for a second and then he sets them. The sound is small and the pain is large and he makes neither a sound nor a face - just a sharp exhale through his nose, jaw locked, eyes gone somewhere flat and far away for about three seconds while the signal travels and peaks and starts to recede. He wraps them tight, index and middle together, a field splint, the same way he figured out how to do it the first time when he was sixteen and couldn't go to a hospital and explain the shape of things. He bites the end of the wrap and knots it with his teeth. Flexes the hand once. It'll hold.

Then he looks at her face again.

It comes back all at once - the sight of it in the hallway, the sound that preceded it, the specific fraction of a second where he was too far away and then he wasn't - and the adrenaline that had started bleeding off spikes back up hard and sudden.

He can feel his pulse in his temples, in his split lip, in his badly wrapped fingers, in all of it - his whole body running too hot, the crash threatening at the edges, and he cannot let it crash. Not yet. Not here. If it crashes here he won't be able to move and he needs to move, they need to move, this is the only thing that matters in the next ten minutes and he needs his legs under him.

He crosses to his bed and drops to one knee - his ribs say something loud about that and he ignores them - and shoves his arm underneath the frame, past the dust and the lost things, until his hand finds the box. He drags it out. It's a shoebox, old, the lid held down with a rubber band, and he pulls the rubber band off and opens it on the mattress and it's cash. Folded, bundled, some of it crumpled, some of it in rubber bands of its own - every bill he's put away in two years of keeping his head down and his mouth shut and his money somewhere their father couldn't find it. He's been waiting. He didn't know what he was waiting for until about four minutes ago.

He straightens up. Ignores the way his ribs pull. He goes to the closet and drags down the bag from the top shelf - it was already half-packed, has been for months, a habit of readiness he never let himself name out loud - and he starts moving. Clothes, the box, the knife from his jacket pocket, the lighter, two things off the shelf that mean something that he won't admit mean something. He works fast and he works quiet and his hands are still shaking and he doesn't stop. He's not stopping tonight. Tonight is the thing he's been building toward without knowing he was building toward it, and he can feel it in his chest like something finally snapping clean, painful and right at the same time.

He straightens up with the bag over his shoulder and turns around and looks at her - really looks at her, her face, what his father put there - and something passes across his expression that he doesn't cover in time. Something raw and specific and furious and guilty, guilt that has nothing to do with what he did in that hallway and everything to do with what he didn't do sooner, what he let go on too long because he was tired and broken and didn't think either of them had anywhere to go. They have somewhere to go. They have enough. He should have counted sooner.

"Get your stuff." His voice comes out low and rough, the adrenaline still audible underneath it, his breathing not quite even. He holds her eyes. Doesn't look away. "Whatever matters. You've got ten minutes." A beat. His jaw tightens. "We're not sleeping here tonight."