Borne of Habit: Prologue
It's Dewey who proposes Truth or Dare.
Both Malcolm and Reese say it's babyish, God, Dewey, you're almost thirteen years old. But they go along with it so they can make each other do things that usually their few collective ounces of common sense dissuades them from doing. They intersperse 'Truths' for good measure; between Malcolm and Reese the questions are mostly about drinking and sex (they have a surprising amount of questions considering they're experienced in neither), for Dewey their questions are slightly more benign. It's kind of fun, even though neither Malcolm nor Reese will actually admit it, until Dewey gets his fist 'Truth' out of Malcolm.
What is your biggest secret?
"You can't tell Mom or Dad."
Dewey and Reese promise thoughtlessly.
"You know where I went when I cut class a couple weeks ago?"
"Arcade," Reese answers.
"No, I--well, yeah, for a little while, while I thought about it. Then I came home."
Reese gives him a half-smile. "Your big secret is Krelboynes don't know how to play hooky?"
"Yeah, Jackass, that's exactly it."
Then Malcolm starts chewing on his nails and they know it's a good one.
Then, now that they're paying attention to it, they see Malcolm's really mostly just chewing on the edge of his thumb, having already chewed his nails down as far as they can go. And they know it's a bad one.
He voice is stilted. He's choosing his words carefully, trying surprisingly hard to sound nonchalant. "So, I was thinking about it-- Kind of. Not really. I don't know. A lot of people think about it-- then I came home. And since no one else was going to be home for a while, I figured I might as well…"
"So you watched gay porn," Reese guesses. "Figured as much."
"I'm not gay," Malcolm answers automatically. He has to shove his hands in his pockets to keep from chewing on his nails, but they're back out again almost immediately. "Well, there's the knife Dewey cut his hand with, not the butcher knife, the other one, the one that's not totally dull--" Malcolm pauses. "You won't tell. No. I mean, there's no reason to, anyway. It's not like it's unusual; it's not like it's something you'd have to tell Mom and Dad about. " He suddenly speaks very quickly, "Suicidal inclinations, particularly in our age bracket, really aren't uncommon. And I mean I only tried once, technically; I only cut three, four times tops and it didn't even go in very deep and then I said 'Screw it', anyway, so it's not even like I really meant it. Okay. My turn. Reese, truth or dare?"
"I cut my sandwich with that knife!" Dewey screeches. It's kind of funny that that's the first thing he thinks of. He even thinks specifically that it was a bologna on rye. Then everything falls into place behind his eyes and he repeats "Suicidal." in this high-pitched voice that makes Malcolm a little sick.
Malcolm says, "Oh, come on, Dewey." in an exasperated way, like Dewey's overreacting.
Both his brothers are inclined to believe this is the case just so they wouldn't have to face the alternative. Dewey and Reese sit back down uncomfortably on Reese's bed. They share hesitant glances and watch as Malcolm moves onto his index finger, chewing on the slight, torn, almost-filmy edges of his nail. They both know they'd be willing to delude themselves if Malcolm would only give them a reason to.
"You write a note?" Reese asks, almost hopefully, as though it's the only way it could be serious.
Malcolm counters, strangely defensive, "That's cliché."
Reese freezes from the inside out; he can't breathe, much less move.
Malcolm keeps sighing over and over in an exaggerated way; he would be the epitome of annoyance if only he sounded annoyed. Instead he sounds like he's trying to be annoyed, an actor not quite nailing the part. He paces in an awkward way; he keeps trying to stop himself from doing so after taking only a step or two in either direction, resulting in him being caught in a cycle of jerking, abrupt turns.
"Let me see," Reese decides finally. He lunges forward, grabbing Malcolm by the hands and turning Malcolm's wrists skyward. "There's nothing," Reese says with relief.
"Let go of me, Buttwad. I didn't slit my wrists, that's stupid! It's not e-" Malcolm yanks his arms back. "Look, it's not like you guys have to look after me, 'Oh, gee, whoops, we left Malcolm his shoelaces, now he's hanging from the ceiling'. It was, it was--" his eyes sort of go blank for a second, looking through Reese as he sits back down beside Dewey. Dewey and Reese know he's thinking of how to outsmart them, and they both involuntarily resent him for it. "An idle thought that manifested itself as equally idle action. Clearly I didn't go through with it. More importantly, clearly I could have if I was inclined to. It was a curiosity--an abject curiosity, but a curiosity nonetheless-- that I was compelled to explore and…"
He falters, just a little and just long enough for Dewey to cut in with, "You meant it."
It's funny how much impact the words have--Malcolm collapses into himself like a demolished building. He gives Dewey a long look that's not so much depressed as it is absolutely nothing. It scares Dewey enough to make him grip at Reese's hand.
Malcolm reforms himself brick by brick. He starts again, and this time it sounds perfectly sincere and un-manufactured. "Okay, it was stupid. It was really, totally stupid and if either of you ever did anything even remotely similar, I'd beat the crap out of you." He's usually a pretty adept liar, but this time he seems desperate; where honesty ends and dishonesty begins is clear: "But that doesn't mean I meant it."
He looks at them pleadingly. The tables have turned somewhere along the line. Suddenly Reese and Dewey are the ones who seem convinced of what his motive was and he's the one who needs reassurance.
They have nothing.
"Dewey," Reese says. He's looking at Malcolm. "Truth or dare?"
"What?" Dewey asks, horrified. "What is wrong with you?"
Reese pulls down hard on Dewey's hand, yanking Dewey's arm just enough for it to be uncomfortable. "Truth. Or. Dare."
"Dare," Dewey answers miserably.
Reese relaxes visibly. "Good, me too. I dare us to tell Mom and Dad what Malcolm just told us."
It's probably stupid that this makes it easier. It makes it something to be caught up in; a goal to meet. Most importantly, in spite of Reese being the darer it makes it seem like an outside force is making them do it; they have to betray their brother's trust (and they know it still is a betrayal; maybe it's stupid to feel that way, too); they were dared to. Instead of the usual adrenaline rush that dares inspire, this draws away the fear.
Malcolm looks quickly back and forth between them. "You can't. You promised."
They shrug helplessly.
They have to.
They were dared to.
Reese and Dewey both stand fantastically in sync.
Malcolm's fingers lace behind his head. He sways a little like he's inclined to block the door, but he doesn't actually move. He breathes like his lungs have all at once been halved, taking in shallow and rapid breaths. He flings his arms out in an over-the-top gesticulation. "Okay, I meant it. You happy? I meant it. Everything got a little out of hand so, yeah, okay." His face contorts a bit and he looks away from them, but he doesn't cry; his eyes don't even get glassy. He's somewhere past sadness, somewhere closer to resignation. It's hard to tell what it is, exactly, that he's willing to accept. "Sometimes I want to. Fine. Sometimes it really--it gets-- You wouldn't get it. I can figure this all out by myself, okay? I know what's going on. I know what I can handle, I'm not a little kid or something." He runs a hand across the top of his right thigh, absently. He's thinking hard and fast, eyebrows furrowed, strained at a task that's usually effortless. "So would you just…"
They wait for him by the door.
His fingers roll against his inseam, imagining the whitening scars. He'd cut too low that first time, too far over, funnily scared that he'd hit his crotch and have to explain it. Maybe not scared, exactly. The next few cuts had been hesitant, but they'd bled readily for being so small, and he'd known that just a little bit deeper and longer would do it, so he'd breathed deep and relaxed. He'd thought it was a good thing no one was going to be home; how could people do this with others in the house? His hand had gathered a cold sweat, so he'd wiped it on his shirt. He hadn't yet pushed the blade back down, but he'd gripped the handle and his hand was steady and calm as it hadn't been before. He'd blinked slowly and it made sense in an absolute way, the way it seemed to half of the time, contrasted to the half of the time it was, he supposed, not nonsensical but maybe-probably a bit of an exaggeration.
That was, with what seemed a surprising amount of coincidence, when Reese and Dewey had come home.
He'd cursed himself for losing track of time. How had he? He never lost track of time.
He'd thought to himself he would have done it if his brothers hadn't come in just then. If they'd run late, he definitely would have.
He'd thought it vaguely, then, a thought he hadn't really even had to think. A fact he'd already known.
He knows it now.
With a slight breath, he finishes weakly:
"..get Mom and Dad."
:--:--:--:
"How'd it go?" Reese asks when he's though.
"You weren't eavesdropping?"
"That's Dewey's thing."
Malcolm answers the question as though there were no interruption, "All right: Mom yelled, Dad cried, I nearly puked. I wish 'I cut myself' wasn't such a mundane statement around here, it would've made it easier." He lays back on his bed.
Reese stretches out alongside him. "You open with a joke like that? No wonder you bombed." He nudges at Malcolm's ribs with his elbow, but gets no response.
"I'm not joking…It took a while for them to understand, that's all. Probably took longer since I didn't particularly want to explain it." He folds his arms across his chest and shuts his eyes. "By the way, you get to babysit me until I'm trustworthy again."
"Really? Awesome."
"'Awesome'?"
"That means you have to do whatever I want, right?"
"Not exactly. But you can pretend, if it makes you feel better."
"What, I just get to sit and watch you?"
"Yep."
"Damn, what'd I do?"
"I think it was that thing with the fire hydrant."
"Damn," Reese repeats. He's quiet for a long while. He turns his head a little to look at his brother. "I told you you could come to me."
Malcolm's eyebrows furrow as he racks his memory. His face relaxes when he finds it: "That was only because Francis screwed us over. Crap, Reese, that was years ago."
"Yeah, but now he's married, so he's pretty much escaped. That puts me on top again. Francis gets married, I'm in charge; I wind up in jail, you're in charge; you're a brain in a jar, Dewey's in charge; Dewey joins the circus--Well, Jamie's pretty much screwed. You know the rules. It was implied I'd take over all his brotherly duties. That means going to me for advice, butt munch."
Malcolm opens his eyes again. "No. I couldn't." He finds Reese's gaze so intrusive that it hurts to meet it, and he wonders what Reese sees inside him. "Not about this."
Reese looks up at the ceiling, wounded.
There's a long stretch of silence.
"Mom said she's calling Francis," Reese says finally.
If there's any outburst this would cause it's one of anger, but mostly Malcolm's just tired, so he just rolls over so he doesn't have to face Reese anymore and shuts his eyes.
:--:--:--:
Even though Dewey's gently shaking his shoulder, it's his little brother's cold feet on his stomach that wakes him up.
"Dinner's ready," Dewey says. He's sitting awkwardly on the bed, taking up space, legs bent at the knee--drawn in only slightly towards his chest-- instead of folded under him or crossed Indian style. There's virtually no room between them when Malcolm sits up but Dewey must not mind because he doesn't move. Dewey looks like he wants to say something, opens his mouth, closes it. Malcolm scoots past him to get up. Dewey follows.
Reese is obediently finishing up setting the table when they enter the kitchen, which strikes Malcolm as odd until he looks down at his own place setting. "Very funny, Reese," he says.
"Who's laughing?"
Malcolm narrows his eyes at Reese, but says nothing before he goes to the drawer to get new silverware.
"Get away from there," his mother says, stalling him.
He looks from his brother, to his mother, to his own food utensils which are small, plastic, but most importantly annoyingly childlike contrasted to the shiny silver of his family's. His hand grips stubbornly onto the drawer's handle.
Gesturing toward his place at the table, Malcolm appeals to his father, "Dad, what's--"
"I took them from the chicken place down the block."
"You stole a spork."
"Sporks. And knives."
"Oh, this is completely--" he opens the drawer and sees what his father meant. There are more plastic sporks and knives in there than they've ever had of legitimate silverware. He can't even see the legitimate silverware for all of them. "Dad--These are free and I still think you took enough for this to classify as a felony."
"There's more in the car."
"Malcolm, get away from there and sit down," his mother interjects.
Hoping to placate, Malcolm holds his hands out defenselessly as he turns to his mother. "I just think this is illogical--"
"What do you think is illogical? That you have a family that cares about you? That loves you? That worries for you? That doesn't want you to hurt yourself? Do you think that's illogical?"
"No." This wasn't at all what he'd been thinking of, but the word still rings so false that it makes everyone feel uniformly and tangibly embarrassed for him. There's an underlying thought that his mother will ream him for it; she's never taken such a blatant lie, but instead all she does is look at him. Her gaze is disturbingly full of concern.
What he'd wanted to say, though, really, was that he's had these thoughts before, it's not as though it began the second they became knowledgeable of it; he's had them for months this year and for the entire summer before he started high school. And at night he'd sat at the table and sawed through his food and he'd never once cut himself, no matter how often he'd thought about it. That they're only really doing things like this to make themselves feel better. But 'I wanted to kill myself when I was 13 and nothing happened', sounds too boo-hoo-cry-more-melodramatic to be used in a serious argument. Besides which, he shouldn't begrudge them anything that would take the edge off their concern. So he doesn't say any of what he's thinking. Instead, he shifts, sits down, and says, "No. This is okay. I'm sorry."
He spears his pork chop with his spork.
:--:--:--:
The first night Malcolm learns that Reese is right: Dewey is an eavesdropper. Through listening in on Malcolm and his parents' conversation, Dewey had learned far more intimate details of the attempt than Malcolm had shared with his brothers. He'd learned that Malcolm had sat at home for hours refining the logistics (at which point his dad whimpered a little). He'd learned that what had stopped it was that he and Reese had come home (at which point his mother berated Malcolm for being selfish; Malcolm didn't protest). Although it didn't seem the most terrifying, the worst of the facts he learned was that the event had transpired in the bathroom. This, for some reason, was the fact that solidified everything.
This is why, in the dead of night, Malcolm says, "I swear, all I wanted to do in there was pee."
"Then why didn't you?"
"Stage fright."
"I wasn't watching."
Malcolm sighs and gets back into bed beside his brother. Dewey had been polite enough to sit cross-legged facing away from the toilet, but that wasn't really the point. The bed's more uncomfortable than usual tonight, and he shifts. Dewey shifts with him, apparently anticipating another trip. He can feel Dewey's eyes on him, waiting for any movement. Malcolm sighs again. The point, it seems, really, is that he scared the crap out of his little brother.
"Look." He rolls over to face Dewey. He knows he can't just say he's over it; he could possibly convince Reese of that, but Dewey wouldn't buy it. "I wouldn't, won't, at night. In there. I had it planned. You usually use it first in the morning, and you don't use it after school before Mom does when she gets home unless you lit something on fire and need to put it out in the bathtub, which, lately, is less than 15% of the time. I figured Mom could handle it. Maybe Reese, too. Not Dad. And you're too--"
The ending here is, of course, 'young'. Maybe age isn't something that matters when it comes to dealing with seeing something like that or maybe Malcolm just always hated being told he was too young when he was Dewey's age, but he doesn't finish.
Dewey blinks. He hadn't expected an answer this blunt. He thinks offhandedly that he'd be able to take it better than Reese could-- Reese and Malcolm have always been closer than he and Malcolm have-- but it's not really a right he wants to fight for.
"You could just lock the doors." He doesn't realize he's been holding onto the front of Malcolm's pajamas until it starts to hurt enough, making all his knuckles white and near-popping, that he's reflexively letting go.
Malcolm looks at him strangely. "You're right."
There's an unbelievably long stretch of silence that starts with Malcolm looking at him and ends with Malcolm looking through him, straight through his eyes and brain and out his skull into the wall. Then the covers are flung off and Malcolm's out of bed, to the window, yanking it open, and dropping down easily outside. Dewey's at the window after a few seconds of stunned stillness, looking between Reese's prone form and the darkness outside. His brain is dead. He tries to call out for Reese, but his voice is dead, too. It must take him too long to unfreeze, because by the time he thinks he has his voice back, Malcolm's hoisting himself back inside, screwdriver in one hand, eyes already on the bathroom door.
Who kills themselves with a screwdriver? Probably somebody, right? It's flatheaded, but it could be done couldn't it?
Dewey feels like throwing up. He moves to Reese, but Malcolm catches his hand, and Malcolm's palm is warm and alive, it's his own that's clammy-cold, and Malcolm drags him into the bathroom, locks the door that separates it from their room, and pulls him around and through until they're back on the other side. Malcolm drops to his knees in front of the locked door. He squeezes Dewey's hand and lets it go. "I'm going to show you how to jimmy it. Then I don't have an out, right? We're back at square one and we can both sleep? Okay, now just don't do this when Reese is in the shower. He won't even get dressed before he comes after you."
It's wrong of him, but Dewey hates it a little that it's taken this for Malcolm to do something with him one-on-one. Maybe it's more wrong that he enjoys it anyway.
:--:--:--:
Malcolm sort of expected the following morning to be different: You told everyone, now don't you feel better?
It was all just unfurling during the night, everything leftover from the confession was settling itself into place to make life right, but in the morning... In the morning, everything should be good again.
But, yeah, no. Not really.
The morning is exactly the same as every other, maybe even a little worse.
If he's feeling particularly cerebral about the whole thing, Malcolm realizes that mornings are composed of shoulds and wants and have tos.
You should get up. Why? Because of school, you want to go to school, don't you?
So he thinks about it, but it doesn't seem big enough, so he tries again.
You want to go to school and graduate and go to college and get a job and be rich.
So he thinks about going to school and graduation and college and richness and finds himself apathetic. And it makes his heart hurt, because he's spent nights up eagerly thinking about this, hasn't he. Going over pros and cons of colleges and success rates and job growths and rolling his eyes when Reese looked at him funny over it. Why doesn't he care? He tries to make himself: Remember how you felt about this? Remember how the thought of Harvard made you dizzy you were so nuts about it? Think about Harvard. Think about Harvard accepting your application. But there's no excitement to inspire. Maybe it's just because there's no way they'll ever be able to afford Harvard. Or maybe even the possibility is too far away to count as incentive. He dismisses it.
You should get up. Why? Because Mom will drag you out by your ankles if you don't. You don't want her to humiliate you, do you?
So he thinks about the covers getting ripped back fast and his feet being yanked up above his head and being deposited on the floor. And he feels a squeeze that's almost fear because the mere threat of this got him out of bed so often once he got to be old enough to recognize it as embarrassing instead of just annoying, but now it doesn't matter. The sheets are warm and he may as well just stay here, wait, see if she does.
You should get up. Why? Because it's easier when you're up. You want it to be easier, don't you?
So he tries to think about it being easier. It really is easier when he's up and going, like it's that first bike pedal down a steep hill and he'll be carried down by the simple laws of nature until he reaches the bottom around the middle of the day, and sure he'll have to pedal slow-slow-slow-hard-hard-hard-may-as-well-just-stop-here back up to the top after that, but maybe it's worth it. But the more immediate ease would come from doing nothing. From staying in bed, not sleeping because his brain's not tired enough to let him even if his body is, just staring at nothing and feeling the pressure behind his eyes and against his chest and thinking it would be even easier if he just--
You have to get up.
To this no 'why?' is necessary.
You have to get up. You have to get up. You have to get up. Havetohavetohaveto--
He gets up and it's a tiresome process of heavy legs and lamed arms and it's really not worth it but it's as easy to stay standing as it is to lay back down.
"You're up," Reese says, standing from his own bed. "Finally. Mom made me perv on you, watch you sleep."
Malcolm starts walking to the door. He says, "Gross," midway, like he had to look for the right response.
Reese tails him closer than is necessary to the kitchen, where the rest of the family already is. Once there, Reese separates himself from his brother. Malcolm fixes himself cereal, pours a cup of orange juice, and sits down.
Dewey has class today.
Reese and Malcolm do not. No special reason; teacher in-service.
Reese suspects this means the teachers are throwing a party under the guise of doing something professional.
Malcolm doesn't care enough to correct him. He thinks about why the lack-of-school didn't occur to him when he trying to use it as an excuse to get up, but it didn't much matter either way, so he lets it go.
"But I can't go to school!" Dewey shouts. "Only Reese'll be here! It's okay if Reese sees! Don't you even care?"
"Dewey, what're you-- Reese! Get your finger out of there!"
Dewey's mouth is open mid-word, but then his mother's gone, first off after Reese, then offering last minute advice to Malcolm, then back for a second to tell him to get going to school, then kissing his father goodbye and heading out the door. Dewey tries for his dad, but his dad shrugs into his jacket, then tries to touch Malcolm's shoulder--reaching out, pulling back, reaching out, pulling back, finally settling it in the air above Malcolm's shoulder instead-- Malcolm says "I'm okay, Dad." in a perfectly neutral voice before he continues eating his cereal, and his father strokes his tie, chuckles, "Oh, yes, Son. Of course." and hugs Malcolm so suddenly that Malcolm nearly chokes on his spork, leaving Malcolm to twist around awkwardly in his seat to return the embrace.
By the time his dad passes by to leave, all that's offered is a "Get to school, Sweetheart." before the door's closing.
Dewey huffs, unslings his backpack, opens it carelessly, and dumps its contents onto the floor. He yanks open the kitchen drawer, pulls out all of the knives, and drops them in. Malcolm watches him benignly.
Dewey seethes. He stalks over to the sink, pulls open the cabinets beneath it, and drops all three bottles of cleaner into his backpack, one by one by one. He stomps to the bathroom and clears out the medicine cabinet; snags the razorblades; goes to the tub and steals the plug. By the time he's done his backpack is heavy, full, smelling like Windex and sticking him in the spine. He walks back down the hall.
Reese must've thought he'd been left to watch Malcolm alone because they're standing together, pushed up side-to-side, when Dewey sees them again.
"I'm calling you in for school," Malcolm says, a little personality dragging itself into his voice. "Unless you'd rather see how well your plan of taking that bag into a roomful of Buseys works out."
Malcolm grabs the phone. Reese takes it from him.
Reese stretches the phone cord out like a gangster with piano wire. "Too ropy."
"Hadn't even thought of that one. Thanks, Reese. You call Dewey in; Dewey, you put everything back; I'm going to get my homework."
"You didn't do it already?" Reese asks while dialing.
"I have all weekend," Malcolm answers, walking away.
Malcolm comes back with his book bag. He opens it and drops his book, notebook, and pencil haphazardly onto the kitchen table. He pulls open the book and sits down.
Dewey's finished with the knives. He moves onto the cleaning fluid.
Reese hangs up and pulls up a seat beside Malcolm.
Malcolm's already tired of this and he hasn't even started. It was a mistake to get up, but it'd be a mistake to go back to bed. It's just a mistake all the way around. What he thinks he ought to do is drag Reese and Dewey outside to shoot some hoops; go roller-skating; do something not-so-ordinary. The ideas are all appealing, even uplifting, but at the same time feel too far away. Doubtlessly they'd take too much effort, no matter how energizing they seem right now, if he's barely up for this. He settles for the homework.
Dewey moves on to the bathroom.
Malcolm starts to read the text. Although the letters are sharp enough to seem legible, the words stay incomprehensible. He rubs his eyes. He reminds himself how many words he can read per minute and that this is a mediocre textbook at best. Only complete idiots couldn't understand it. This helps minimally, letting him gather the meaning of half the words.
Dewey comes back and takes up residence in a seat on the other side of Malcolm.
This is…creepy.
Malcolm starts writing.
His brothers keep staring.
And keep staring.
And keep staring.
"My pencil too sharp? Want to get me a crayon?"
"Nah," Reese answers.
Around this time, possibly even because of Malcolm's comment, Reese starts to notice something strange that maybe oughtn't be strange. After he's done writing down the answer to one question and is reading the information for the next, Malcolm starts absentmindedly stabbing himself in the thigh. It's always exactly the same place, stab-stab-stab, write, stab-stab-stab-stab. It's not a knife or anything. It really shouldn't matter.
Reese decides he's really being stupid, thinking it's something more than it is. Probably. He says, teasingly, "Rink! Rink! Rink! Rink!" in time to Malcolm's down strokes.
And he thinks it's pretty funny, so, yeah, he's definitely being stupid.
"What?" Malcolm asks without looking at him. "Are you calling me 'psycho'? That's kind of a cheap shot, isn't it? I don't like this arrangement any more than you do."
Stab-stab.
"I wasn't doing that, Dilweed."
Malcolm doesn't respond.
Write.
Stab-stab-stab-stab.
Reese chews his lip. It still seems serious.
Write.
Stab-stab-
Reese slams Malcolm's textbook shut. Malcolm sighs.
"The first time," Reese asks, "When was it?"
Malcolm's incomprehension comes more at the fact that 'when' was asked instead of 'why' than it does due to Reese's non sequitur. It takes a lot of effort to lift his hand to set his pencil down on the table. "Will this really help?"
"Yeah," Reese answers unhesitatingly.
"…Dewey?"
Dewey nods emphatically.
Maybe it will. He's been in therapy before. It ended with him bawling; Reese bawling; his mother bawling, but it'd still helped a little bit even if he had embarrassedly dropped the entire 'therapy' thing by the next day, ashamed at how much a stranger knew about his family and himself (it was more than all right if she had thought him unstable when he was acting; if she did when he was being perfectly honest was another thing entirely. He never found whether she actually thought he was crazy or not, but the possibility was more than enough.). He considers Reese's question seriously. "The first time I tried to," he says, voice even. He prepares himself, building up to talk. Maybe it will help.
"You only tried once," Reese reminds pointedly.
"Oh, yeah. Right."
Dewey and Reese share a look past him, but they don't really want to know any more gory details, so they don't urge him to continue this way.
"So the first time I…thought about it?" Malcolm continues.
Reese nods.
"…Years ago. The summer before high school. It started about two weeks in." He leans back to think about it. He has a fantastic memory, but he hasn't really dwelled on how he acted then for anything more than fuel for his actions now; one more example of how he's too bothersome to put up with. That entire summer he'd laid around in bed saying he wanted to die. To never wake up. He'd whined and whimpered and cried an undignified amount about the unfairness of life. Then he'd whined and whimpered and cried for being a wuss who whined and whimpered and cried. He'd walked around the house smelling like the clothes he'd had on for three days straight. He'd asked plaintively, 'Why does it hurt so much?' "You know, when I was acting like a total jackass."
"You meant that?" Dewey whispers at him.
Reese had punched him in the shoulder and told him, 'I'll put you out of your misery.' a few times and Dewey had made a day out of flicking paper footballs at him once, but mostly he'd been left to wallow until his mother had finally told him to cut out the theatrics. It really hadn't felt overdramatic then, even though, in spite of all his talking about it, at the time he hadn't thought nearly so much about actually going out and killing himself as he does these days.
It doesn't occur to him to be angry at his family for dismissing it then, because reflecting on it he dismisses it, too. He certainly wouldn't act so badly nowadays over something like this. He thinks the way he's acting now is probably the more mature way to go about it. Even though this time he thinks has gotten a little too vocal, it's still an improvement on before. He'd definitely exaggerated everything then, and he's probably doing the same thing now. He probably hadn't even really tried to kill himself.
"Malcolm?" Dewey prods.
Besides, the day his mother told him to knock it off was the same day he did knock it off--boom, one event and the hopeless, helpless feeling was virtually gone for so long--so it definitely wasn't that serious to begin with. He explains this, feeling cruel for worrying them, "No, I guess not. I realized it was stupid when we went to the zoo and Dewey and me almost got eaten by the tigers. So." He shrugs. "No, I guess I didn't." His stomach rises up in shame. What the hell's wrong with him? This is pointless. Is he doing this to get attention or something? Is being noticed for being smart not enough for him?
"When'd it come back?" Reese asks. It's a somewhat obscure way to ask, but Malcolm understands it.
"I don't know, recently. A few months ago, September, I guess. No-- If I didn't mean it to begin with it couldn't have 'come back', though, so, no, not recently. Never. It never came back. I'm sorry. This whole thing's stupid. I'm stupid. Let's just stop."
He must've said something he didn't realize he was saying, because Dewey's grabbing his hand again. He's not up for pulling away, so he's just going to let it hang limp in Dewey's grasp. But then he realizes if he's going to act like this the least he can do is try to be reassuring, so he squeezes back.
"So…" Reese ventures. "What you need is a near-death experience that's worse than tigers. To stop it for good."
"Reese," Malcolm says tiredly. He looks at his older brother and feels his younger brother's sweaty palm in his, and he leans forward, rests his elbow on the table, and covers his face with his free hand as well as he can. He's thinking of how he must be faking even though it doesn't feel like it because who wants to actually kill themselves when they have so much going for them, and he's thinking he's an asshole for worrying his brothers like this, and he's thinking they really do love each other even though no one else thinks they do and even though none of them are inclined to say so now. And he's crying, damn it, and it strangles his voice and he hopes his brothers don't notice, "Reese, that's amazing: I don't even know what you have planned and I can already tell you about a million ways it can go wrong."
Notes: So, yeah. There's chapter one. I'm a little uncertain because I know so little about the topic, but hopefully it was all right. In the very least, now I can get to the meat of the plot. Title is based on an ideology presented in a self-help book I read (which I can't remember the name to), which is that depression and suicidal inclinations are habitual; originally, guilt makes the thought recur and eventually you just fall into a cycle. I can't say from experience if this is a truism or not. Episodes referenced in this chapter are: Smunday (season 1), Therapy (season 2), and Zoo (season 4). I bumped the timeline up a year from 'Truth', because it's relevant to Malcolm's reason why. This will probably be a gen-fic, but possibly be Malcolm/Reese (feel free to offer any opinions you have on this. I'll stick a warning in if it gets to be the latter, so please don't stop reading on account of the possibility.). Sorry for the double post; I get antsy about stuff after I stick it up. I cleaned up and clarified some dialogue and I may go back and tweak it some more (though this time I'll just replace the chapter). I think there will be 2/3 chapters, with the ultimate word count being 20,000+.