Title: Him
Author: Neoxphile
Setting: post-IWTB Categories: post-col, Christmas

Summary: The couple who'd asked Will to stay for Christmas was nice, and he wanted to trust them, but he knew instinctively that he couldn't replace the child in their hearts.

Author's note: written for The Nursery File's This Christmas challenge

Wyoming
December 24, 2013

Outside the wind whistled, and it wasn't all that surprising that the bedroom he shared with three other boys felt chilly, not when there were small cracks in the wall to let the cold air in. Most of the time it was easy enough to shrug this off: generally speaking all four boys were grateful that they had a bedroom to sleep in, even if it was a drafty one. There had been times in the last year where this wasn't the case.

For a while after their parents died, most of the kids had lived in a tent city with other refugees. That had been bewildering, depressing, and an entirely more miserable type of cold given that in Will's case, at least, his parents had died when winter bleeds into spring, leading to muddy days and frigid nights. Things had gotten better after that, much to Will's disbelief, and by late summer kids who'd been orphaned like he had been had mostly been gathered up by well-meaning adults and given homes. Sure, there were ten boys in the house, and Mrs. Ogden wasn't their mom, but it was much better than the days of cots and hunger that had marked the first half of 2013.

Downstairs someone had put on a Christmas CD, but he wasn't really listening to it. Christmas music had grown negative associations in his mind, ever since the year before. The doctor that Mrs. Ogden insisted that the boys speak to said that it was normal to feel that way, especially considering how he'd lost his parents. Will had listened carefully to what the man told him, and nodded, but he didn't tell the doctor that he was also worried that he didn't deserve to feel as bad about what had happened to his folks as the other kids did.

After all, his parents had sat him down when he was six and explained to him that he was adopted, and the rest of the kids had lost their real parents. So did that mean that he didn't have as much a right to grieve as the other kids? The only person he'd ever talked about it with was Mrs. Odgen's twenty-year-old daughter, Kelsey, who'd left college after everything happened and moved home to help her mother with the kids. And Kelsey had immediately asked him if his "real" parents were dead. Puzzled, he'd just said he didn't know and asked why that mattered. Kelsey had replied that if they were dead too, then he'd have even more of a right to be upset than the other kids, because he'd lost twice as many parents. He knew that this had been said to make him feel better, but it didn't, really. Instead it just left him wondering why he hadn't been good enough for his first parents to keep. That was something that hadn't bothered him much before March.

''They're here," Kelsey said as she poked her head into the room. When she noticed that he was doing nothing, she asked, "Geez, haven't you packed?"

Will just shrugged and shook his head.

Sighing, Kelsey grabbed his bag and began yanking his dresser drawers open. She didn't ask his opinion of any of the items she scooped into the bag, probably figuring if he cared, or deserved to have an opinion, he would have already picked things out. It took her less than two minutes to fill the bag and hand it over to him.

"Thanks," he said grudgingly.

Kelsey stared at him, expression slightly less disapproving. "Why don't you want to go? You don't like the Addisons?"

"They're okay."

"Then what's the problem? You wouldn't be up here moping if you wanted to go with them."

Will had to bite his tongue to keep from acidly asking if she'd learned that in her intro to psych class. Kelsey was usually nice to him so he shouldn't be rude, even if he thought she hadn't returned to college yet because she couldn't cope with it anymore. So, looking up at her he said instead, "I don't think they really like me."

Kelsey blinked. "Will, they invited you for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Usually people only do that sort of thing when they're thinking about adopting one of you guys. Why on earth would you think that they might not like you?"

He knew that she wasn't wrong because he'd seen several boys leave after weekend and holiday visits, and yet... He didn't want to tell her about the picture, so he didn't. "I think they just feel guilty."

"Guilty for what?" she asked sharply.

He couldn't figure out why she instantly seemed upset, at least until he realized that she was worried that he might be implying that they felt guilty about something they'd done to him. "For not having had as bad stuff happen to them as happened to me." He looked her in the eye so she'd understand that they hadn't done or tried anything funny. "Because my parents died, and my house is gone, and I live here, but their lives are pretty much the same."

It wasn't hard to come up with this explanation because it was also true. The woman had looked pretty damn guilty when she said that they'd lived in the same house for seven years.

"Oh, Will." To his surprise, Kelsey hugged him, reminding him of his mom, even though she was less than half as old. "Just promise you'll give them a chance, okay?"

He swallowed hard before nodding. She wasn't someone he could lie to easily, so he had to talk himself into honoring her wishes before he could answer. "I'll try."

"Try hard."

"I'll do my best."

"Well, that's all you can do." she let him go. "Horry on down, they're waiting."

Smothering a sigh, he slung the bag over his shoulder and headed out of the room. Kelsey followed as far as the hallway, but didn't go down stairs with him. No doubt she had another boy to cajole and encourage to go; being Mrs. Ogden's daughter more or less forced her to play big sister to them all. As he moved down the hall he heard her speaking to Timmy, and he wondered what his problem was. Maybe he could ask when he got back... assuming Timmy came back. Kelsey wasn't wrong, a lot of boys got adopted after extended visits. Once there'd been seventeen boys, and now there were fewer without any of them dying like had happened before. All the kids who were gone had been taken in by families, and the general attitude was that this was something to be happy about.

Will just didn't know how he'd feel if the Addisons came back after the holidays and told Mrs. Ogden that they wanted to take him home with them permanently. And he didn't know how he'd feel if they didn't, either.

Although he was grateful that Kelsey had taken over the task of packing for him, Will found the bag awkward to move. It was a bit too big for a kid his size, and it bumped against his hip and left knee with almost every step. That served to make him feel like he was about to pitch over at any second, and he wasn't looking forward to getting down the stairs. He'd watched a TV show on Netflix with his mom, some soapy night time show about married women, and he was reminded of the episode when one of the women was pushed down the stairs and lost her baby. Nothing that tragic could happen to him, of course, but didn't people in movies sometimes fall down the stairs and break their necks? These thoughts were so distracting that he forgot to wonder what the couple had been doing while he'd been doing the moping that Kelsey had accused him of.

They were waiting at the foot of the stairs, which was something he hadn't mentally prepared himself for. His stomach rolled queasily and he had difficulty forcing himself to look at their faces. He really didn't want to see them looking back at him with pity, or even worse anger that he'd left them waiting. Thinking of the latter left him feeling a little ashamed. Even if he did have reservations about their motives for having him at their home for the holiday, it was wrong of him to drag his feet over getting ready. It hadn't really been fair to leave them waiting downstairs while he listlessly watched Kelsey pack for him. Then he began to feel a little bad about that, too...

But when he finally dared to look at them, they didn't look like they pitied him or were mad. Instead they seemed a lot happier to see him than he was to see them again. The woman looked at him and asked, "Really to go?"

Will nodded, and shifted the bag's strap. He hadn't meant to draw attention to how uncomfortable it was, but the man reached for the bag and took it off his shoulder. In the man's large hands the bag looked lighter somehow, or maybe smaller. Either way he carried it off easily, not struggling at all like Will had been all the way down the stairs. Glancing over his shoulder, the man asked, "Do you have a hat?"

He blinked, not expecting that sort of question. "Um, yeah," he muttered, hurrying over to the coat closet.

"Good," the man called after him. "It's snowing. The ears are the first place to freeze."

"Well, amongst the first, David," the man's wife corrected. It sounded like she knew what she was talking about, and her husband didn't argue about it.

Or at least not that Will noticed, but once he ducked into the closet the sheer mass of coats muffled things so much he probably wouldn't have heard them unless they were shouting. To his dismay he didn't see his hat immediately, and he was tempted to just grab one of the ones he could see, but he didn't want it to seem like the kids didn't have their own stuff, because they did. Mrs. Ogden made sure that they all had their own clothes, probably because communal clothing seemed a lot sadder and desperate. Living in a group home wasn't the most fun thing in the world, but it wasn't Oliver Twist or Annie there either.

Will finally spotted a familiar black hat with dark blue stripes and picked it up, jamming it on his head even as he backed out of the closet. Eying the couple he wondered why they weren't annoyed that he was taking so long. Maybe they weren't eager to reenter the teeth of winter, either.

This seemed likely because snow blew in as soon as the door was opened, and Will blinked it out of his eyes. Some landed on his cheek, cold enough to sting.

Somehow he hadn't realized that it was snowing, even though he thought that he had looked out the bedroom window. There was an even white blanket of snow on the ground, and that suggested that it had been snowing for quite a while.

The snow crunched under foot as they made their way to the car. Will had always liked the sound. Not as much as the sound of hooves on pavement, but there was something comforting about the noise. Soon enough, though, they were at the vehicle's doors. Without any commentary, they all got in and closed the doors. Without being asked, Will put on his seatbelt. He'd heard of adults who got tickets for not putting theirs on, but after a decade of watching his parents buckle in as soon as they got in the car someone minding it seemed like an alien concept.

As they pulled onto the Addisons' road, Will half expected Maddie Addison to announce "We're here," but she didn't. Staring out the window at the trees in the yards they passed, he supposed she didn't want to insult his intelligence. It had been less than a month since he'd visited them at Thanksgiving.

The car slowed as they approached their driveway. Will found himself thinking back to the morning of Thanksgiving. They'd showed up at Mrs. Ogden's and asked to meet the boys, which was something several other couples had already done that day and the three before. He and the other kids had all seen the TV ads suggesting that people remember the war orphans, so he wasn't too surprised that a bunch of couples took this as a prompt to do something nice for the kids who had been left behind after the invasion. Especially now that the invasion was over and it seemed like humans had won the war.

Mrs. Addison had smiled and gathered the boys who didn't already have a place to go. There were just a few of them, and Kelsey told them all that they needed to smile more, and be more pleasant when they had adult visitors. This of course only made Will scowl all the harder: it didn't amuse him at all to feel like a kitten hoping to escape the pound. It really wouldn't have bothered him to stay with Mrs. Ogden and Kelsey, so he really had no desire to impress anyone.

But the Addisons had smiled when they saw him, and then whispered to his guardian, so he knew before he was told that he wasn't staying for dinner with Kelsey after all. This left him curious and suspicious, wondering why they would have picked him instead of one of the boys who had put on company manners.

They were so nice, though, that he began to forget that he'd been concerned about that in the first place. And for most of the visit things had gone pretty well. There had been a turkey, and it was the first that Will had tasted in a year. He and his parents would have had one on Christmas night, if the aliens hadn't landed and began blowing things up a couple of days before that. (instead they'd eaten spam in the dark because the invaders had already disabled the power by then). Everything else too, including rolls, cranberry sauce and a pie that Maddie had let him help fill with pumpkin filling. For a little while it was possible to pretend that it was just a normal holiday, not the first major one since the invaders had been driven off and fled the world, going back to wherever it was in the universe they'd come from.

After a pleasant meal he'd asked to go to the bathroom, and then his nice feelings fled. It had been such a simple thing that shattered his piece. A photograph on the dresser of the couple's bedroom.

He hadn't meant to spy, but their bedroom door had been open, and as he walked past it to get to the bathroom he couldn't resist the urge to look in. It looked a lot like his parents' room, which left his heart aching vaguely, but it was the photo that really did him in.

The baby was small and bald, and lovingly held by David and Maddie. They looked like they adored him, even though he couldn't have been more than a few days old. They adored each other too, quite plainly, though that at least wasn't something that had changed as best as he could tell.

After he washed up in the bathroom, he'd found himself slow to return to the kitchen, and he realized that he was looking for signs of the other little boy. But he couldn't find any. A super quick peek into the other rooms on that floor only revealed an office and a spare room, no child's room, no nursery. There were no other photos around, not there or down in the living room either.

And they never mentioned him.

He thought that bothered him the most. The boy wasn't there, so he was sure that something bad had happened to him. From the way the happy people in the photo looked at the baby it was clear that he was theirs, not a nephew or a friend's little boy. Will was pretty sure he was dead. He just didn't know if the boy had died recently, or as a baby. As a baby, he leaned towards, given that empty spare room. If he'd been the one to die, not his parents, he was pretty sure his stuff would still be there after a year.