Gordon's got a funny habit of winning coin tosses. No one can explain it, just how exactly his odds sometimes seem to be better than strictly fifty-fifty. Maybe it's confirmation bias, but it always at least seems like a quarter tossed in the air comes down exactly the way Gordon wants it to.

So when Virgil wakes to the smell of bacon, filling the apartment, he's the one who wakes up in John's bed. The sheets are grey jersey, smooth and comfortable. John opts for a rather firmer pillow than is Virgil's preference, but overall it's still better than the armchair next to the couch. There's a weird abundance of blankets in his brother's apartment. The two extras from across the end of the bed have been sequestered by Gordon, taken to the living room. Doesn't matter. Virgil didn't need them. The bed's already covered with a heavy down comforter, which might not be enough for John, but is plenty for his younger brother.

He stretches out and sighs at the alarm clock beside the bed. It reads a quarter past six. Technically, this is fine, though he gives an obliging groan at having woken up so early during the hallowed allotment of leisure that's supposed to be Spring Break. Virgil's had a solid eight hours of sleep and really has nothing to complain about. It had been an early night for everyone, and he and Gordon are both habitually early risers anyway.

Gordon had groused and growled and grumbled about being stuck with the armchair, but as far as heads versus tails had gone, Virgil's pretty sure Gordon had ended up where he'd wanted to be. He'd even declined when Virgil had offered him two out of three.

But then, Gordon's got it in common with the toss of a coin that he's got two very distinct sides, and you have to be lucky to have him come down on yours. Lying in his big brother's bed, staring up at the ceiling, Virgil wonders if John realizes just how lucky he is.

Because if Gordon's in the kitchen doing something as mundane as frying bacon, then John's made it through the night. No sudden cardiac events, no need to call an ambulance. Virgil's a light sleeper and he'd slept with the door open, but there hadn't been a sound from the room down the hall. To say he's relieved would be an understatement. Virgil's been carefully avoiding thoughts about the sorts of things that might go wrong with his older brother, as though imagining them might call them into happening. He's thankful John's had an uneventful night.

Whether it's going to be followed by an uneventful morning remains to be seen.

So Virgil heaves himself out of bed, stretching and rolling his shoulders. He hesitates only briefly before stepping into the hallway, not sure if he needs to tiptoe.

Virgil chews his lower lip as he walks softly into the living room. Curled up on the couch, practically in the fetal position, John looks half-dead. His hands are pulled in close to his chest, and Virgil can see the tips of his fingers twitching slightly. It hadn't been much later than eight in the evening before John had dropped off. By Virgil's math, John's going on ten hours of sleep. In spite of this. there are still dark smudges beneath his eyes, and he doesn't look like he'll be stirring any time soon.

Gordon leans out of the kitchen, hands caught on either side of the door frame. It's March and it's Boston and John's apartment is chilly in the morning, but Gordon's still wearing yoga pants, cropped to the knees, navy blue with sunshiney yellow stripes up the sides. In acknowledgment of the fact that it's damn cold on the east coast, he's also swimming in a slate grey hoodie, presumably pilfered from John's front closet. The sleeves have been rolled all the way up to Gordon's elbows and his forearms are splattered with bacon grease.

"Mornin', Virg." Gordon doesn't bother to drop his voice to a whisper. "S'coffee, if you want."

"Yeah, thanks. Morning." Virgil circles around the coffee table to lean over the couch, get a better look at their brother.

Before he can ask, Gordon fills him in, "Was fine. Last night. I think he woke up maybe once before I crashed. Not for long, and I don't think he really woke up, just sort of muttered a bit and then went right back out."

"That's good, I guess." Virgil peers at John and then second-guesses himself. "…is that good?"

Gordon shrugs, retreats back into the kitchen, an unspoken invitation for Virgil to follow. As expected, there's a pan full of bacon, being cooked slowly and carefully in small batches. There's a carton of eggs, eighteen rather than twelve, because Gordon's omelets are made with six apiece. A bag of frozen hash browns is slowly thawing on the counter. Virgil returns it to the freezer and turns to the coffee pot, fills a waiting mug and repeats his question, "Is it okay if he sleeps this much?"

Another shrug. For the first time in years, this is more likely because Gordon doesn't know, and not because Gordon doesn't care. He answers, "He's fucking exhausted, Virg, and on his way into drug withdrawal. I don't think we can stop him." Gordon's fingers grip tight around the handle of the pan he's moving off the heat. "If he's sleeping, then at least he's not awake and feeling like shit," he points out. If this is meant to be a good thing, he doesn't make it sound like it.

"Guess so." Virgil goes to lean in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, dividing himself between John and Gordon, same as he ever has. He sips at his coffee and pulls his phone out of the pocket of his pajama pants, thumbs his way through the usual morning hit-list—email, news, assorted social media—carefully resists the temptation to search for any information about amphetamine detox. He's not sure he's ready for that yet, and anyway, he trusts both Gordon and John to be better informed than a quick Google search would make him. On that note, he asks, "So…so, did you ever…with this kind of thing…? Uh. Did you… hm. I mean, specifically, with this…with what John's…"

Gordon's finished with the bacon, has it draining on paper towels on a plate beside the stove. He's pouring bacon grease off into another coffee cup and doesn't look up when he answers, "What, did I ever fuck around with Adderall? No. Wasn't ever really my speed." He chuckles, humourless. "Pun intended."

Virgil shakes his head. "Not really funny."

"Wasn't really laughing."

Virgil clears his throat and adds, "I dunno, Gordon, I'm just asking. This all scares the shit outta me."

"Drugs are scary."

That's maybe the understatement of the weekend so far. Virgil rubs at his eyes and watches John for a few more minutes, before he summons up the nerve to say, "He's…but I mean, he's gonna be okay, though. Right? Once he gets through it. It's just gonna be a rough couple days, and then—"

It's fundamentally unlike Gordon to be so stern and his voice is hard, has an edge to it when he answers, "More like weeks, V. We still haven't got it out of him just how long he's been on the fucking drugs. This isn't—I mean, just because this shit's prescription doesn't mean it hasn't been killing him. There's the whole other question of why he'd pick it up in the first place. I don't know if he's okay. I think he probably isn't.And I'm still mad at him. So it's kinda hard not to feel a little bit like he deserves this." Before Virgil can say anything about that, Gordon's turned away from the counter and held a hand up to stop him. "I'm not gonna be an ass about it," he clarifies, as his eyes cut to the doorway, indicate just exactly what he's thinking of. "S'just how I feel."

It puts Virgil in mind of coins again, and how Gordon and John are two sides of the same. As much as Gordon goes out of his way to broadcast his emotions, his heart affixed firmly to his sleeve and the words "how I feel" always ready and waiting—John plays everything close to the vest. John's someone who'd play solitaire as though it were poker, betraying nothing as he moves his cards around. Even if an observant onlooker could tell it was a losing game.

If the pair of them are the faces—obverse and reverse, heads and tails—Virgil supposes that makes him the edge. Leaning up against the frame of the door between the kitchen and the living room, listening to Gordon and watching John, he thinks about being the thing that separates his brothers, just the same as he connects the pair of them. It's an early morning thought, a quiet, careful thought, and something that his grandmother had taken him aside about, long ago.

"Welcome to middle-management," she'd said, with her hands sandwiching one of his. It's a funny sort of memory, because somehow it seems timeless. He can never remember just how old he was when she'd said it—whether it was right after their mom had died, or right after they'd moved out to the island, or just somewhere in the middle of his early-mid-to-late adolescence somewhere—because he only ever really remembers her hands and her voice when she'd said it, halfway proud and halfway sad. "Now that they know you're good for it, from here on out, every last one of your brothers is going to start turning towards you. And as if that's not bad enough, they're gonna want to find you solid and sensible and ready to set 'em straight. If it ever gets too much to handle, you kick 'em right on up to me. But somehow I don't think you're gonna let them down all that often, Virgil."

Half the trick, Virgil's learned, is knowing how to play the rest of them off each other. Gordon's turned back to the counter, started to crack eggs into a bowl and beat them into submission with a fork. He's running water in the sink to rinse off a colander full of fresh strawberries, so it's no wonder the blond doesn't hear the faint shuffle from the living room couch. Virgil watches green eyes peel themselves open, bleary and confused. He clears his throat and deliberately looks away, into the kitchen as Gordon reaches over to turn the water off.

"D'you wanna talk about it?" he prompts, and switches to watching Gordon and listening to John. "About why you're mad at him?"

This gets a short bark of sardonic laughter. "Ha. Man, Virg, if it's not obvious, then where d'you want me to start?"

Virgil shrugs, sips at his coffee, and pretends he doesn't notice the sudden stillness that's fallen over the living room couch, the void of sound and movement. "Well, with the obvious, then, I guess."

"He might've killed himself." Gordon flicks his wrist and cracks an egg on the countertop, then splits the shell, one handed, while he continues to work with the fork. The list goes on, "And even coming up just short of killing himself, he's done some seriousharm. His heart, his brain. God. I hate even thinking of it. Doesn't that make you go cold all over? I just—I grew up so hyper-conscious of my body, and how it's a machine, and how it's all you've got. That anyone could do something so careless—I dunno, it's just personally offensive to me that he could fail to care. That he could hurt himself like this and choose not to care. He's sure as hell not stupid enough not to have known."

This is such a fine point of emotion that it's probably going to takeyears to tease it out of John. Whether or not he really knew the kind of consequences it would have, what had tipped him into the solution in the first place—how he had to have felt, to do something so desperate. Virgil's willing to play the long game, but Gordon's always been about short term answers. "I think it's probably not as simple as that, for John."

Gordon's moved on to a block of cheddar cheese, shredding it on a grater purchased yesterday, specifically for his lasagna. John's kitchen is bare of anything beyond the very basics, as far as tools go. "Yeah. Well, that's part of why I'm not gonna throttle him."

Virgil resists the impulse to steal a glance at his older brother, to gauge his gratitude relative to not being throttled. He knows from long experience that John's listening, and to catch him listening will only embarrass him. "Charitable of you."

"Yeah, well, he's a fucking charity case now, that's for damn sure." There's a hiss and a crackle of oil as Gordon splashes a mess of beaten eggs and cheese into the pan he's been heating on the stove. "I've decided," he adds, "that I'm just going to be about one trillion times nicer to him than he was to me. I am gonna be better than he was. I am gonna out big-brother him. That'll show his stupid ass."

This sounds like the beginning of a manifesto. Virgil drains the rest of his coffee and lets the mug hang from his fingers as he folds his arms, arches an eyebrow. "Oh yeah? How's that?"

Gordon continues, picking up steam and hitting his stride. "I am not gonna be a condescending prick, I am not gonna give him shit about things I don't understand, I am not gonna assume that just because I know a thing or two about quote-unquote 'partying hard' that I therefore know anything about people who take drugsacademically. I'm not gonna make him feel like he's done something to Alan, by doing something like this. I'm not gonna make him feel like he's let the whole family down. I'm not gonna make him feel like he oughta be ashamed. I am gonna take every one of the reasons why I was mad at him, and I'm gonna turn 'em right back around." He pauses and there's a smug sort of satisfaction about him. "That'll teach the bastard," he declares.

"Sounds like it'll be effective," Virgil comments. "Kindness by spite. I like it."

"It satisfies a very deep need," Gordon agrees, prosaic, working a spatula around the outside edge of the pan, folding a puffy cloud of eggs and cheese in half. For a while he concentrates on this, and Virgil casually lets his coffee mug dangle in an increasingly loose grip, til it's barely hanging from his fingertips. He's about to risk a glance at John, when Gordon speaks up again.

This time his voice is soft and you'd have to know Gordon as well as Virgil does to read in his body language what his tone doesn't betray. Virgil wonders what John would make of the way their little brother's set his shoulders, the way his hands are tight, and the way he's intent on a task that doesn't really take this much intensity. John would probably draw entirely the wrong conclusion. "I mean, the truth is—fuck. He's not gonna need my help to feel terrible. This isn't like what I did. Honestly—and I know you've heard this before, so I won't get started about it—but you know how I still don't feel like I actually did anything wrong. No guilt. Zip. Zero. No shame, either. But it's like Scott says; how with Dad, you gotta pick your battles. I'm not gonna fight about this, with John. There's a lot to fight about but hey, look. Me, picking my battles. But it's like…he's gone and made me think about what it would've been like to lose him and…and how things are, with him and me. John shouldn't have to be dead for me not to be able to live with that."

It's really very convenient, having Gordon's heart pinned handily to his sleeve. Makes it readily accessible, easy to point to and say There. Right there. D'you see?Helps that Gordon's one of the most empathetic, emotionally articulate people Virgil's ever met, and this is with due consideration given to the fact that Virgil hangs out with psych majors on occasion.

"Are you having any bacon?" Gordon asks, breaking the conversation sharply, transitioning back to the mundane.

"You just really don't believe me about the vegetarian thing, hey?"

"Ha. Yeah, right. Fuck no."

Virgil takes the opportunity to shift his weight against the door frame—and drop his coffee cup, to fall and crack with a fantastic shatter of porcelain on ceramic. This makes Gordon jump and curse, boosting himself up to sit on the counter and avoid the shards that litter the floor. "Aw, hell, Virg—"

"Sorry, sorry—" Virgil drops down to start gathering up shards of broken glass, and feigns guilt, glancing over his shoulder into the living room. John's pushed himself up onto his elbows, peering into the kitchen. "Shit, John, sorry. Sorry, didn't mean to wake you."

"Oh, way to go, V," Gordon mutters sarcastically, reaches over to turn the stove off. He slides down from the counter, tiptoes around the perimeter of the kitchen and leans out through the door, bright, cheerful, and, perhaps most importantly, kind. "Good morning, sunshine. You sleep okay?"

Over his shoulder, Virgil hears the query, rusty-voiced and a little disconnected, "Something break?" There's a groan and some shuffling of blankets, the creak of the couch as John sits up. "Morning," he adds absently. "Gordon? Wh-what broke?"

"S'just a coffee mug, bro, Virgil's wrecking up the place. Vegetarians, you know, they're such assholes. I'll make sure he buys you a new one. You hungry, Johnny? Ha, don't answer that. You want four eggs in your omelet, or six?"