Chapter Text
When it happens, he's at Bing's party. Looking back, he can't remember what he's doing at the exact moment, but it's somewhere between examining the bookshelf and having another beer pressed upon him by Bing and being once again told that he should mingle more. He thinks he should have felt something, when it happened, but he didn't. It was just another evening.
He hates parties. Even Bing's.
When the call comes, it's two in the morning. 2:14, to be exact. The girl next to him isn't exactly his girlfriend, but it's easy to fall into bed with Cate, as he's known her just long enough to not be so awkward as he is around most girls. It's casual. The phone wakes her, too, and the moment imprints itself on his memory: her eyes in the darkness, a nondescript moment. She's there when everything changes, and that's how he'll always remember her: as the one who was there.
William. Something catches in the voice on the phone and he's wide awake. William, there has been an accident.
Ms. Reynolds is his father's executive assistant, and she's like an aunt to him, and her voice breaks on the last word. There's nothing she can say, no way to say it that can make it easy on him, and so the words tumble out, sometimes together and sometimes broken: black ice, in the Sierras. On their way back from a dinner party.
They pulled his mother's body from the wreckage, he learns later. His father was airlifted to the hospital and died upon arrival. But Reynolds doesn't tell him any of this, not now. She just tells him that his parents are dead. The accident happened at ten minutes to midnight, sometime between looking at the bookshelf and Bing telling him to mingle.
The touch on his arm brings him back to the present. Cate is there, and he's making choking noises. His stomach has ended up in his throat somewhere, and his mind is screaming. He tries to focus on what Reynolds is saying, but all he can think about is his mother's voice two days ago, telling him they were going up to the Sierras for the weekend.
Gigi has a big swim meet in San Diego, so we thought we'd just go up for the weekend.
The next few hours pass by in a blur. There are papers to sign, calls to make. He leaves Cate in his bed at Harvard and catches a red-eye flight to California and Tahoe, where Reynolds has arrived ahead of him and meets him at the hospital. He signs whatever they put in front of him. Their words fall and crumble around his ears, never really reaching him. Reynolds's hand on his shoulder is the only thing keeping him grounded, and he manages to hang on until they're in the plane again, heading to San Francisco, and only then does he break.
He's allowed to lose it. He has to do it now, because his sister is flying back from her swim meet this evening and she doesn't know yet, and the worst moment of his life will be when he has to tell her, and he'll have to be strong for both of them.
In the end, though, he doesn't have to say anything. He sees her before she sees him. She's laughing with her friends on the swim team, and his heart feels heavy, because the moment she spots him will be the moment he destroys her. And he does. That little line forms between her brows when she sees him in place of their mother, and she slows in her step, and then stops altogether.
She isn't willing to come forward into her new reality, and so she stands there while people jostle and bump and move around her, while her friends move off. Finally the coach lays a hand on her shoulder, and robotically she moves forward, her eyes never leaving his face.
She's so small, like a fawn with her wide eyes. She's always been tiny, like a sprite always stumbling after him growing up, begging to be taken along or inserting herself into his activities. He remembers her breaking his telescope and how he'd made her cry, and their mother's words: You two are going to have to get along, because someday you're going to need each other.
That was supposed to be decades in the future. Not when they were not yet fourteen and twenty.
The tears are there before she reaches him, and he moves forward to take her up in a hug, unable to stop his own eyes from leaking. He ushers her out of the airport and the driver is taking them home when he tells her everything. He has to tell her that no, they're not hurt. Not anymore. He has to tell her about the black ice in the Sierras. He has to tell her they're not coming home.
She's making some sort of heaving, retching sound, and he can't do anything but watch as his sister dies inside. They cling to each other, and if there was anything left of his heart to break... but there isn't.
It's like a bomb went off inside his little sister, and he's left to pick up the pieces of her that's left. Only he's just been hit by the blast, too, and he's got to crawl around bleeding while he does it.
He's glad that he doesn't have to walk into the empty house alone, because he comes undone all over again when he sees his father's coat left slung over the back of a chair in the living room, and his mother's briefcase on the counter. Pieces of their life, left strung about all over the house. Gigi collapses in the living room and he sits beside her on the couch, and they stay like that for hours. She doesn't stop crying. The phone rings. Reynolds checks up on them. Aunt Catherine is flying up. Bing will talk to his professors. Fitz is coming over tomorrow, skipping out on class like he used to do in high school.
It's Gigi that pushes him into motion, into some sort of living, though not intentionally. He's aware that he's responsible for her now. She doesn't see him cry, but sometimes she sees him with red eyes in the morning, or after he gets out of the shower.
It isn't easy, being the strong one, the responsible one. It's her that keeps him pushing forward, though.