A/N to Soliteyah -- if Darry's your fav, you should like this. All reviews welcome. And if anyone knows what the boys' mom's name was, let me know. I couldn't find itanywhere so Imade it up.

Chapter 5: Night thoughts, part 1

When Darry woke, the room was dark. The glass of water Cinnamon had poured still sat on the night stand and he sat up to sip at it, trying to ease the dryness of his throat.

He supposed he understood why Soda had called them. Sodapop was always in the middle, always trying to make peace, always forgetting that conflict and tension didn't mean you didn't love each other. Maybe it wasn't a fair thing to ask. And Cinnamon was right – he was glad they'd come. It always took him a moment to remember the two youngest were grown, a man and a woman, professional people with families of their own, but still his little sister and his baby brother. They, and Soda, were somehow his, despite the fact he wasn't actually all that much older. Once, years ago, Laura had asked him, "Why didn't you have any kids, Uncle Darry?" and Darry had answered, not thinking, "Why, I had your daddy and Uncle Pony and Aunt Cinnamon." It was true enough.

These days, he had little to do but think. He wasn't used to staying in bed or staying still and he'd never been much of a reader, except for the daily newspaper. TV bored him. So he thought. He remembered. Sometimes he smiled, but mostly he had regrets. He had come to terms with his illness. He never thought he'd live a long life anyway – hell, he was a little older now than his own father had ever lived to be. After the first panic, that morning in March when his legs refused to obey his brain, he'd been calm. He consented to the chemo and the radiation but the transplant -- the idea of someone else's blood and marrow running through his body – turned him cold. Somehow, that was a line he couldn't cross, and it was a line he couldn't let his siblings cross. They had children, all of them – what if something went wrong?

No. When it was your time, it was your time. He had not believed that years ago, but he believed it now. Otherwise, the idea of losing Johnny and Dally, and his parents, so suddenly and senselessly, would have driven him mad.

Darry could remember with painful clarity every last detail of the day his parents died. A state trooper had come to his dorm at the University of Oklahoma, broken the terrible news and then driven him back to Tulsa. When they got there, his siblings had already been told and the house was full of policemen and social workers. Darry was furious they hadn't been allowed to hear the news from someone who loved them and his anger was misinterpreted as stunned grief. Pony was sobbing on the couch with Soda's arms tight around him and Cinnamon, inexplicably, was in the kitchen making coffee. "Mommy would want me to," she'd stage-whispered to Darry, even though she hadn't called their mother "Mommy" in years. "She'd offer it to them, at least. And cake. I wish there was cake." She was cool and calm and completely unreasonable, and she didn't cry at all until Johnny Cade appeared at the back door, holding a handfulof wildflowers because he didn't know what to do and he thought he should bring something. At the sight of him, she burst into tears and cried in Johnny's arms until she threw up.

A social worker had pulled Darry aside and suggested she find a suitable place for the three younger children to stay, at least temporarily.

"No one should live like this," she said.

"Ma'am, everyone in this neighborhood lives like this," Darry said coldly, "and you ain't taking them anywhere."

But he'd thought about it. When the shock wore off, and he realized he'd have to quit school, he thought about it. He thought about foster homes – they couldn't be all bad, right? Would they let him visit? Could the three of them go together? He could ask, he thought – he could at least ask. He could finish his degree and get a real job, a good, higher-paying job, and reunite them. In two years, Soda would have been 18, so it would only have been Pony and Cinnamon he'd have had to get back. Maybe he could keep the house, come back weekends. Maybe it could work.

But in the end, he was selfish. He had lost his parents. He couldn't lose his little brothers and sister too. So he quit school, found a two jobs, and snarled at every state worker who came on the property. His main focus became keeping his family together, which was not only his blood family, but also the gang.

Sometimes, he thought he'd failed miserably.

It had been hard, and Darry was in it alone. There was so much his siblings didn't know. Darrel and Mary Curtis had left no wills andno life insurance. Cinnamon was already in nursing school when the funeral and hospital expenses were finally paid off and Darry was determined that, if he fell off a roof, Soda would not be in the same fix. As a result, he was obsessively covered, worth more dead than alive. Even when money was tightest, he paid that insurance premium before paying the electric bill.

There had been so many meetings with state workers – welfare workers, social workers, counselors.Darry could never understand why the state was so interested in how he was taking care of his siblings and no one gave a glance to Johnny Cade, who was battered and bruised and belittled almost daily. He was offered food stamps and fuel assistance and welfare and he refused it all, remembering how horrified his mother had been by the idea of "going on the county." He did accept the Social Security benefits because their father had earned them, but he banked most of it, and when the checks stopped coming when Pony turned 18, he split the money three ways to defer Pony and Cinnamon's college costs and help Soda buy the DX.

But it was exhausting. Juggling work and money and trying to be sure homework was done and there was food in the house and it was reasonably clean ... and having to explain every little decision to the social workers who showed up every few months to see how they were getting along. He had to convince them that Soda's quitting school hadn't been Darry's idea, that it might have happened anyway if their parents had lived. He had to think how to answer when the worker's eyes would narrow as she asked if they still "associated with hoodlums." And that business with Johnny killing Bob Sheldon -- Darry had been sure he'd lose them then. By the time Ponyboy left for college, Darry was 24 and already had an ulcer.

Maybe, he thought, he was sick so he could rest.

Sometimes, when Darry looked at his youngest brother, all he could see was the look on Pony's face the one and only time he'd hit him. It was the only time he'd hit any of them. Until that night, he'd been frustrated enough to threaten but he'd never struck. He'd raised his hand at both boys and once vowed to take Cinnamon over his knee until she couldn't sit down for a week, but he'd never done it. Not until that night. He would never forget any of it; it all came back to him in nightmares -- the way Pony's cheek turned red immediately, Soda and Cinnamon gasping aloud, Pony fleeing down the street as Darry screamed at him to stop, that he was sorry, and Cinnamon following, pulling Darry's old sweater over her head as she dared him to tell her to stay. Hours later, as the sun began to rise, Darry sat sleepless on the sofa with Soda, waiting for them to come back, too afraid of losing them permanently to call the police. He was terrified to think the betrayed look on Pony's face and the bitter curse Cinnamon had flung at him as she took off after their brother might be the last they lived in this house.

It was more than twenty years ago, yet Darry still believed, somewhere inside, that he, not the Socs, had killed Johnny and Dallas, because that one slap had set the whole chain in motion.

Maybe, he thought, as he swallowed water against nausea, this was what he deserved.