Gordon's propped himself up against Alan's back, snoring. Virgil's sitting two steps above, thumbing his way through probably the thousandth game of Tetris since they all first clustered together on the stairs. There's nothing but silence from the kitchen below, and from the angle Alan's managed, he can see John drowsing with his head in his arms, folded on the tabletop, while Scott flicks idly through some sort of documentation, projected off the screen of the tablet between them.
It's dawn and through the window, there's bright yellow sunshine glittering off the surface of the pool. Alan's cramped and sore and wants to stretch, but the slightest movement seems like it might dislodge Gordon, and he's a heavy enough sleeper that he'll topple down the stairs and give himself a concussion sooner than he'll wake up.
So he stays put, still and stiff and aching and feeling heavy with the weight of everything he's heard said. Wasn't supposed to listen in, until Gordon had come to catch him at it. Instead of telling the youngest off for eavesdropping, the blond had just sighed, lowered himself to sit on the stairs with a groan, and hadn't looked surprised when Virgil had come tiptoeing down in his stocking feet to join his younger brothers on the stairs.
"Virg?" Alan says softly, still worried about waking Gordon. "Are we…is…is everything gonna be okay?"
A big, heavy hand ruffles Alan's hair in answer and there's a soft chuckle. "Yeah, Al. Nothing that hasn't needed saying for a while. We're all right."
"Does being all right usually take so much fighting?" Even between the three of them, Alan thinks the conversation was really only half-heard. His name had come up a lot, and Gordon had put an arm protectively around his shoulders and kept up a running commentary of caveats and reasons why none of it was Alan's fault.
"Dunno. Mom and Dad went at it like cats and dogs, though, and they were always all right. I think it's a good sign, Al. Don't stress. You okay?"
He needs to think about it for a minute. But in the light of morning, it's all a lot less dire than it was, and the scene below them is so calm and peaceful—he'd have to reach for it, if he wanted to find things to worry about, right this second. "Yeah. Uh. Yeah, I am. You?"
Virgil nods, smiles, loses his game. He hands the little console he's been playing with over to Alan, taps the high score up in the corner. "I'm fine, Al. This kinda thing doesn't rattle me like it rattles Gordon."
Alan shrugs carefully and there's a soft, snuffling sigh over his shoulder. "Is Gordon okay?"
"Yeah. It's just Gordon's a lover, not a fighter."
"Yesterday, Gordon put me in a headlock and tried to suffocate me with his armpit."
"Because he loves you."
Alan screws up his face and wrinkles his nose at the memory, and then gives a vengeful shuffle of his shoulders, to tip the brother between them off balance and down the stairs.
Virgil's a bit too quick, easily extending a leg and hooking an ankle around Gordon's torso, catching him even as he tips sideways, starts awake with a bleary yelp. "Whzzt? Whm. Lemme go, Virg. Oww. Friggin'. Ow, hell. Feel like I slept on a staircase all night."
"Dick move, Al." This is Scott from the kitchen table. He's been watching, no telling for how long, but he's got his chin cradled in his hand and a grin beneath the dark circles under his eye, watching the younger three. "Hungry?" he asks the general assembly, and flicks John in the ear, gets a grunt and a middle-finger in answer. "C'mon, starshine. Go get coffee on, it's your turn."
"Who's cooking?" Virgil asks, standing and stretching. Below him, Gordon's yawning and muttering, grumbling about his sciatic nerves. Alan's buried himself in a game of Tetris, still a little spooked, a little shy about addressing the elder two.
"Sounds like you just volunteered."
"I only do waffles."
"No one's gonna complain about waffles."
"John's gonna complain about waffles," Gordon predicts, pulling his arm across his chest and stretching his shoulders, as Virgil steps around him, jogs down the stairs into the kitchen.
John sits up properly, rubs his eyes. "I don't complain, I just prefer pancakes."
"Yeah. We know. 'Cuz you tell everybody. At length. About why you hate waffles."
"I don't hate waffles. I just think—"
"Coffee, John," Scott orders, and snaps his fingers. "Virgil, waffles. Gordon—"
"I'm gonna lie on the floor for a while; if someone lighter than Virgil wants to stand on my rhomboids for a minute, I'll owe 'em one."
"Gordon, floor. Alan—"
"Yeah, yeah, I'll stand on him in a sec."
"Nah. Al, c'mere."
Everything had sounded okay, right up until that moment. But now Scott's leaning on the kitchen island, watching John make coffee, and he's crooked a beckoning finger in Alan's direction. Alan debates lying about the fact that he's almost through the level, but the problem with having older brothers versus parents is that they know about the pause button. He's not having a great run anyway, so he flicks the console off, trudges down the stairs. He plants a foot in the middle of Gordon's back and bounces off of him for good measure ("Shoes, Al! Jesus!") and then meanders into the kitchen proper, pulls up a seat at the edge of the island.
Scott's looking at him, John isn't, and Virgil's cracking eggs into a bowl at the other end of the room. Gordon's still swearing into the poured concrete floor. The unspoken weight of A Talk hangs in the air, waiting to happen, and Alan's kicking the toes of his sneakers softly against the side of the island. He doesn't want to speak first, hopes he won't have to, and reliably, Scott comes through.
"Some stuff's gonna change a bit, Al."
Alan nods.
"Not gonna be too drastic, nothing we won't all pull through together. Nothing that's not...the way it should've been from the beginning. Just gonna start crossing the t's, dotting the i's a bit more carefully, especially where you and your training are concerned."
"Yup."
The phrase dead astronaut rings in Alan's ears, but he pretends it isn't, even as Scott's hand finds his shoulder, gives it a squeeze. "So, hey. Meet the new boss, bit more of a hardass than the old boss."
This gets John to look up from layering coarsely ground coffee carefully into a sleek French press, arching an eyebrow as he corrects, "More like meet the new boss, better technically qualified than the old boss."
"Meet the new boss, unbearable pedant compared to the old boss."
"Oh, hell with you." Boiling water pours from the kettle from higher than it probably needs to, but John's a bit of a show off. The dark, heady scent of ground Arabica coffee rises in the air. The dark line of the liquid level in the carafe rises past two, four, servings and John pauses, then gestures with the half-tilted kettle, fixing the youngest with a green-eyed stare. "Coffee, Alan?"
Scott clears his throat. "He doesn't dri-"
"Alan?"
Meet the new boss. "Yeah, sure."
"...doesn't drink coffee. Takes six sugars and more cream than java, and drinks sweet, lukewarm white death," Scott mutters, but with a grin at John. "Sounds like someone I know."
John just pours the rest of the water and slots the lid onto the press, chilly and aloof and rounding out the fifth in a set of five orders, "Scott, go stand on Gordon."
Scott's answer is a snappy salute, half-deferential, half-mocking. "You got it, chief."
You'd have to be sitting right between the two of them, have to know what you're looking at, to know just what sort of moment passes between John and Scott. It's not a handing off of responsibility, so much as it is a renewal of a partnership. Alan, sitting between them, has a curious ripple bubble up from the depths of his memory; of Mom, Dad, and the sort of moments of union that always went unsaid. And Alan can't help a grin of his own, at the five of them, all together, and all right after all.
