Work Text:
The moment that Kendall stepped in the door, freshly back from Harvard on summer vacation, Shiv knew that something was wrong.
They were all waiting for him by the entrance of the summer house, and he was late. Their dad had been grumbling about Kendall’s tardiness, looking at his watch every 5 minutes, sneaking glances up the hall towards his office. Ever since the divorce, he had been all business, all the time.
But Kendall walked in the door nevertheless. And he was smiling.
This was the first red flag in Shiv’s mind. Kendall didn’t smile a lot. It felt horrible to say, but he was so serious, even when he seemed happy. His face was downturned perpetually – his eyes, his cheeks, his lips. He often looked a bit melty. But today, he was grinning.
The second red flag was that he immediately walked up to their dad and hugged him. She felt a tinge of sadness that a hug was a red flag in their family, but it was. Once a Roy child turned 5, any sort of physical contact between parent and child was eliminated almost immediately. It was just the rules, the only exception being for truly dire situations – their father had hugged them all when they told them about the divorce – or for the camera.
As if on cue, Roman leaned and whispered in her ear, “He knows we’re not being filmed, right?”
Their dad, a bit stunned, clapped Kendall on the back twice and stepped backwards. “Good to see you, son.” He said. It was almost framed as a question.
Kendall turned towards Roman and Shiv and beamed brighter. He rushed towards them and hugged them, one in each arm. “Hey, kiddos.”
Behind Kendalls back, Shiv and Roman exchanged looks with each other, then with Connor and their dad. He brought a finger up and twirled it at his temple, mouthing “crazy.” Roman snickered as Kendall pulled back from them.
When Kendall turned away to give a hug to Connor, Roman and Shiv looked back towards each other. They were each other's metric for these things, and they always seemed to be thinking in the same way. The only difference was that Roman said the things that Shiv wouldn’t.
“So, who are you and why do you look exactly like my brother?” Connor asked, good-naturedly but still skeptical, as Kendall hugged him. This was red flag two-and-a-half. It maybe wasn’t so strange for Kendall to hug the two of them, or their father, but Connor? That was downright weird.
Kendall turned to look at all of them, his hands thrown up to the side. “What? I can’t hug my own family now? We’re really that bad off?” This was the third red flag, and a big one. They all knew that their family was shit, that they were dysfunctional and messy and hateful towards each other. But they never, ever, mentioned it in front of their dad.
This made Connor laugh, but annoyed their dad, who scoffed at him. “I’ll be up in my office.” He gestured towards the room and made his departure as quickly as possible. This left the siblings together.
“I forgot how fucking depressing this place is.” Kendall said, the brightness of his tone disguising the content of the sentence. “Seriously.” He looked around, sizing the place up, hands rubbing together nervously. He seemed to have an excess of energy.
“Okay,” Roman said, extending the latter half of the word, “You’re being super weird so we’re leaving, bye!” He grabbed Shiv by the wrist and led her down the halls into what was once their playroom. She had good memories here, of wrestling Roman when they were toddlers until their au pair had to physically break them apart. Now, the room was just another sitting area, filled again with expensive and fragile knickknacks.
Roman turned towards her and looked at her like he was privy to some secret information. “So, what do you think put ants in Ken’s pants?”
She shrugged. “Maybe he’s got a girlfriend.” Their dad was always nicest, at his most happy, when he had a new woman to parade around. She always wondered if, at some point, it had been like that with their mom. But it didn’t really matter. By the time Shiv was born, their mother was already old news.
This made Roman laugh. “Sure, if you think his new girlfriend’s name is Mary Jane. He’s fucking blasted, Shiv, just look at his eyes.”
As if on cue, Kendall paraded into the room. This was weird. Kendall liked to stick to himself, usually. If they were at the summer house he was usually on the beach, headphones on, staring at the horizon for hours. Why did he want to hang out with his little siblings?
He looked at them shiftily. He was still smiling, but his eyes darted around. “Hey, so,” he said, “I’ve got a friend coming over tomorrow. He’ll be here the whole summer. Just try not to be annoying.”
“Oh, Ken,” Shiv said in her best condescending voice, “When have we ever been annoying?”
“Yeah,” Roman echoed, “I pride myself on being extremely reasonable in all situations.”
He laughed and smacked Roman on the shoulder a bit too hard. He had been right, Kendall’s pupils were blown out the size of saucers. They were a bit red too, bloodshot. “You two.” He said, not really meaning anything, and waltzed out of the room again.
Once he closed the door behind him, Shiv said, “You’re right. He is high. Should we tell dad?”
Roman looked at her as if she just suggested scaling the empire state building with a Twizzler. “Are you joking? Tell dad? Are you 8? Ken’s a grown man, he can do whatever he wants.”
"He probably shouldn't be doing drugs, though, right?" Shiv was the goody two-shoes, maybe even moreso than Kendall. She liked rules, she liked order, she liked sense. Secretly, she thought that this was why she was dad's favorite. But she also knew that Kendall fancied himself to be dad's favorite too.
Roman shrugged. "That's what college is like, right? You do drugs and party and stuff? He'll probably be okay."
So they went along with their day. Shiv and Roman went swimming in the pool, her dunking him over and over until water sprayed out of his nose. Connor went off to do whatever he did, Shiv was never sure. Kendall disappeared until dinnertime, where he made a brief appearance just to take his plates up to his room. Their dad was nowhere to be found.
The next day, Kendall's friend showed up.
Shiv watched him arrive from her bedroom window, peaking out as to not be seen. Kendall had been waiting for him, and embraced him emphatically. It was funny to see the two of them next to each other. Even without speaking to him, Shiv could tell that he had the kind of natural confidence that Kendall had to fake.
She creeped down the stairs to watch them walk around the first floor, Kendall giving Stewy a tour. Her brother, who she knew so well, was different around his friend. He gave his actual opinion on things, not just did dad-approved ones. He scorned things that Shiv never knew he scorned, his dad's military medals and his mom's needlepoint that still hung on the walls.
Eventually, they turned a corner and ran into her as she watched them. She tried to run away, but Kendall gently grabbed her wrist and pulled her back towards them. "Shiv, this is my friend Stewy. Stewy, my sister Siobhan."
She peered at him silently. She didn't quite know how she felt about him.
"Nice to meet you," He said, perfectly polite. "Ken talks about you all the time. You and your brother, the younger one. Roman?"
Kendall let go of Shiv's wrist and elbowed Stewy in the side, ever afraid of any indication that he might be a human being. Stewy elbowed him back, which led to Kendall slapping him, hard, over the head. They play-fought for a second, no real malice behind it, and Shiv saw her chance to sneak away.
She immediately went up to Roman's room, where she found him listening to music on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He did this a lot. She yanked on his leg to get his attention, and he propped himself on his elbows to listen to her, tugging the headphones off of his ears. "What?"
"Kendall's friend is here."
He raised an eyebrow. "Oh? What's he like?"
"Fine. He said Kendall talks about us a lot."
Roman rolled his eyes and laid back, putting the headphones over his ears again. He made a hand motion to shoo her away. Sometimes, Roman wanted to be alone. Sometimes, he couldn't stand it. She could never guess which day was which.
But who needed him? She was 14, the most popular girl in the neighborhood by far. She could do anything. Most days, when Roman was stand-offish, she would bike to one of her friends' houses and they would paint their nails together, or ride horses, or any other acceptable teenage girl activity. But she dreaded the whole routine. She didn't like those girls all that much, and she hated going to their houses, where their mothers would bake cupcakes for them and smile at her in a knowing way. They knew she didn't have a mom, they pitied her. And she hated pity.
So she figured that she'd go to the beach. They had their own private stretch of it, about a mile long, where nobody usually went. Connor would sit out there and read sometimes, Kendall would stare steely-eyed at the horizon. But it was usually just her, or just her and Roman.
She changed into her bathing suit, grabbed towels, and headed down.
On the way was Kendall's room. The door was cracked open, and she could hear Kendall and Stewy discussing something very seriously. She stopped outside, debating for a second. On one hand, Kendall and Stewy were probably just talking about something boring like business law or taxes, stuff that Kendall and their dad always talked about that made her brain fall out of her ears. But on the other hand, she felt that maybe, just maybe, she ought to take a peek.
So she slid up to the door and looked through with one eye, trying to be as quiet as possible.
Stewy had a book balanced on his lap, Kendall was using a credit card to push something around on it. Her heart leapt into her throat when she realized that it was white powder, that he was pressing it into thick lines. She caught the tail end of Kendall's sentence, "-bought how much?"
Her eyes widened as she watched Kendall set the card aside and lean down, taking a rolled up dollar bill and lining it up with his nostril, snorting two of the lines in quick succession with a terrible wheezing sound. When he finished, he leaned back dramatically and brought his hand up to his nose, rubbing at it roughly. His face was red, knees clacking together, eyes turned towards the ceiling. "Jesus fucking Christ," he said, "That's... Yeah."
Stewy laughed and put the book on the bedside table carefully. "About 500 bucks worth. Not bad. Should last us a week or so." He then leaned over to snort his own lines, the hand holding the dollar bill visibly shaking.
She watched in horror as the two of them fiendishly rubbed their noses and shook with the intensity of it. Sure, when you have the kind of money that her family did, you end up seeing some shit when you're way too young. She had only been 7 when she saw one of her dad's business associates drunkenly piss himself in their dining room. But this was different. This was her big brother, and this was cocaine, and this was why he was acting like a nutcase.
As if on cue, Stewy looked up towards the door and made eye contact with her. "Hm," he said, "Looks like we have a guest."
Kendall's head swiveled towards the door, and his jaw dropped when he met Shiv's eyes. "Oh, fuck."
Before she even realized what she was doing, she ran. She ran down the hall, down the two flights of stairs, through the living room and the dining room, out the back door, through the backyard. She didn't stop running until her toes fell where the sand and ocean met. She was exhausted, her heart pumped in her ears, as she doubled over and rested her hands on her knees. She stood there, panting, for what felt like hours. She watched the sky, saw dark clouds rolling in. It was going to rain soon.
It was times like this that she missed her mother. Not like she would know what to do any better than she did, or her dad would. Like her dad, if she told her, she'd probably just wave her off. Maybe it wasn't her actual mother that she missed, but a fabrication of what a mother should be. If that was the case, she had been missing that her whole life. It just seemed more painful now, like the scab had been scratched off.
Simultaneously, she heard thunder and felt a hand on her back. She didn't have to look to know that it was Kendall standing behind her. She stood up straighter and shrugged his hand off her shoulder. She was being weak. She didn't need his comfort.
"I'm sorry, Shivvy." He said, his voice gentle. "It's really no big deal. Just some fun, you know?"
She opted to stay silent. She didn't know what to say to him.
"I promise. Just... don't tell dad, okay?" He stepped up to stand beside her, sighing. "You know what he's like."
She did know, which is exactly why she was thinking of telling him. He would straighten Kendall out, as he had Roman. A year in military school had fixed his bed-wetting problem. Maybe a bit of harshness was what he needed. But she cringed to think about the immediate aftermath, the yelling and theatrics.
"He'll take me out of college, Shiv." Kendall continued. "I need to be there. I need to be away from here. You know."
When Kendall had left for Harvard, Shiv had been angry for weeks. Of course, right when the divorce happened is when he had to leave them. She didn't need him or anything stupid like that. But he made the pain a little easier, strength in numbers. She had grown used to their little band of 3, her and Kendall and Roman. And she was jealous, of course. Of him being able to leave and never come back if he wanted to. So she did know.
Selfishly, she knew that if she told their father, and if he came back, the 3 of them would be together again. It was everything she thought she wanted. But her heart broke at the idea of doing that to him, her big brother, who protected her as best he could, even if it was never good enough.
They stood in silence, minutes stretched on.
"I won't tell him." She said, almost beside herself. She shocked herself at how hoarse she sounded. It felt like her words were coming from someone else entirely, that she was a spectator in her mind. Someone else was pressing the buttons, someone else had control, her brains' autopilot.
"Thank you." He said. She finally got the nerve to look at him. He was anxiously twisting his hands, tapping his foot. His fancy shoes, his favorites, were covered in sand. "I miss you guys."
"We miss you too." She said, because it was true, and the rain started beating down on them, hard as bullets. She felt completely and totally alone.