What? A fic that isn't about Louyd? Crazyyyyyy.
Dewey deserves a spotlight now and then. He has struggles too. This story is a bit more about Huey finding out about Dewey's struggles but there's a nice bit of Dewey. This is going to ha e a second chapter eventually.
"Do you think mom would like us if she wasn't our mom?" The voice broke through the darkness and woke up Dewey's half-asleep brothers.
Huey and Louie both knew that if they said nothing they could ride out Dewey's late-night questions but Louie seemed too sleepy to remember, answering and causing Huey to groan.
"Why would it matter if she liked us if she wasn't our mom?"
"Just a hypo… Just um…"
"A hypothetical," Huey supplied, unable to stop himself.
"Yeah! A hypothetical. Huey gets it!"
Huey did not, in fact, get it.
"I think she would like you, Huey. You're smart." That made Huey smile since it wasn't often that his brothers called him smart instead of nerdy.
"I think she would like all of us," Huey said, "we're the Duck brothers. We're pretty cool."
"Super cool," Louie agreed sleepily.
"Yeah. I hope she'd like us. 'Cause I'm going to be just like her."
"Except for getting lost on the moon, please," Louie requested.
"Yeah. Not that part. I've got all I need down on earth anyway."
"Awww. You mean us, right?" Huey asked.
"Right. I love you guys."
"Love you," Louie mumbled.
"I love you guys too." That seemed like the end of the conversation until a minute later when Dewey had something different to say.
"Sometimes I don't feel like a person," Dewey mumbled.
Huey sat up straight in bed.
"What? What do you mean?"
"Uh, never mind. Good night."
Huey climbed down onto Dewey's bed, offering his younger brother a hug. Without being asked Louie followed suit and soon the three were huddled together.
"Are you doing alright, Dewey? Anything you want to talk about?"
"Oh I have lots I wanna talk about. Like cows. Why are they so weird? Have you heard about cow therapy? It's when you go in and hug a cow until you feel better."
"People will try anything," Louie muttered.
"Dewford. I meant do you want to talk about why you don't feel like a person sometimes? Do you feel that way now?"
Dewey subconsciously leaned into Huey a little more, comforted by being squished into a hug by both of his brothers.
"No, I'm okay right now. Sometimes I just feel this… Momentary tiredness, something real slow and quiet, it just grabs me sometimes for a minute, and then it's gone. And when it happens my head feels all floaty and I don't feel real, for a minute. And then I get back to myself and everything is fine, but yeah."
"How often does that happen?" Huey asked, rubbing Dewey's back.
"A couple times a week. But it's not really a big deal, Hue. It's just something that happens, it probably happens to everyone. Right?"
Huey was about to say that no, not everyone on earth disassociated on a weekly basis -though he wasn't sure disassociating was the right word- when Louie pitched in his two cents.
"Happens to me sometimes."
Dewey looked smug for a second, that he wasn't alone, and then he thought about it a bit longer.
"Is it bad? When it happens to you?"
"I don't think about it anymore," Louie said.
"So it is bad." Dewey frowned deeply.
"I don't really know what you're going through," Huey confessed, "I don't… I don't have those exact same problems but I'm here for you. I love you guys. If you want to talk about it more… I'm here."
"Dewdrop, when it happens to you, is it really a moment or does it just feel like a moment? Because I've seen you space out before and I don't know if it's as quick as you think it is," Louie said, taking charge now, speaking from experience.
Dewey hugged himself, thoughtful.
"Maybe? I don't know."
"Because when I space out I feel so very aware of the time passing. Sometimes it feels like hours, in a flashback I can't get out of, or just very stuck in my own head."
"I don't feel stuck in my head," Dewey said, shaking his head firmly, "I feel stuck out of it. Like I can't get back in. I just have to watch myself stand there."
Dewey frowned and played with a loose thread dangling from his blanket. He wasn't the kind of person who liked just standing around.
"That sounds horrible," Huey said, looking at his brothers. He wanted desperately to help them, full the different edges of the same painful knife.
"It passes. I'm fine. I'm really tired, Hue. So… So let's just go to bed." Dewey forced a smile, not wanting to linger on the time spent outside his head anymore.
"I've always been fine," Louie agreed, always quick to brush off his problems.
"Okay," Huey said, a pit forming in his stomach. How could they just move on from this sickening revelation? How could they just keep going, without trying to fix it?
"I love you guys. My favorite little brothers in the whole wide world."
"We're your only little brothers," Louie said, but his smile seemed almost real.
"Love you too," Dewey said, and then the three settled in their own beds.
Huey couldn't sleep, though, so he read. He read everything he could about disassociating and how to help someone who was disassociating. He read the symptoms, the signs, the solutions. He read until his eyes strained and he felt hollow and sad that his brothers had never confided in him before. But eventually, he accepted that there was nothing he could do in the middle of the night except hope that the days to come would be kinder to his brothers. Maybe hoping would be enough.
