/AN: Written for a tumblr prompt for an anon. Its suuuper short, oops ;^;/
There are a lot of things Edgar doesn't know about Curtis, many of which he would never know, but he's okay with this. He knows he would never learn everything about Curtis, not his life before the train, and not his life at the beginning. The older man always preferred to move on from the past, always moving ahead. "We live now; forget about what was then," he'd say. Curtis has his secrets- stories of his past that he not only hides from Edgar, but from most others in the tail section too. Stories he pretends are are long forgotten.
But this one secret is different. There's something being kept away, something he's specifically not telling Edgar and Edgar alone; somehow he just knows that. He knows that whatever it is, it hollows away until nothing but solitary guilt is left. He knows that Curtis gets quiet and serious when the days he raised Edgar comes up. He knows that sometimes he'll avoid Edgar for a full day, lining up for protein blocks in silence and climbing into his bunk without a word.
Sometimes Edgar's mother comes up in late night conversations, amidst the snoring by everyone around them. What he remembers. If he misses her. Sometimes Edgar wonders if she's part of the secret.
Edgar knows that Gilliam knows. He sees the knowing looks, the shared words mumbled as they pass so that he can't hear, the way he just seems to know something. And Edgar knows it shouldn't, but somehow, it hurts. Because he's always been Curtis's right-hand, and though he hadn't always been at his side, he's here now. And he's always trusted Curtis, always done what he'd been asked, from learning to sleep in his own bunk as a kid to indulging in talk about a new revolution. Curtis has always been everything to him, and maybe his affection has grown too strong, but Edgar will always be a kid to the other, young and clumsy and crash and naive and it hurts.
He'll never ask; he knows not to; he learned that a long time ago, but he always wonders what it is that Curtis trusts to tell Gilliam and not himself. After all, what's a right-hand man when his leader doesn't trust him as such?
/AN: I recently watched Snowpiercer and I'm ruined tbh. Magicsintheair is my beta./