Week XII - UDC 8
56. Break
It was starting to be routine, gathering on the couch to talk about the day, even if it was something small. Helen smiled at how Pete was curled into Nick's side comfortably. It should have been odd, but here in the space of their home, it had ceased to be anything but normal. "So where do we start?"
"Tenseness," Walt told her, narrowing his eyes at the boys, and Pete wasn't looking back at him. "Well?"
"I didn't want medication," Pete said quietly, almost inaudibly. "I had to be talked into it, even though my arm ached."
Helen nodded slowly and looked at her son over Pete's head. Nick shook his head minutely in the negative, that he didn't understand this either. "Why, then?"
The answer was long in coming and Nick tapped him on the shoulder. "This is later, Pete. Why didn't you want it?"
57. Quiet
Walt saw the unshed tears before they started to fall and shifted closer, drawing Helen closer as he did so. This was not a child that showed things like that easily, and until he'd grown comfortable to a certain degree, Pete also had not dropped the formality of their last names. "It can wait if you need to, Pete."
"No," Pete told them with a shuddering breath. "I didn't want it because every time the nurses came around with pain medication, Grandpa would fall asleep. Often. And then... they almost didn't let me in to see Mom, when she was so sick, after."
That made sense, Walt thought as they watched Nick hug him tightly. "She got better, though."
Pete nodded, but there was more hesitancy in that movement than Walt was comfortable with, given what he'd heard from Noah. "Mrs. Juusten had to explain that what they'd given in the hospital and what I was prescribed for my arm weren't the same thing. It sounds stupid, that I would need that explained, but-"
"No," Helen interrupted and Pete looked at her sharply. "Not stupid at all, and I'm glad she explained the difference between the two."
58. Lives
"And Karen probably gets her sledgehammer tendencies from her mother," Nick mused suddenly and Helen looked at him sharply. "You met Karen's mother, Ma. This came up when Karen was giving the math packet to Pete."
Helen nodded. "I was wondering how it would."
"I don't get to say I'm fine when I'm not," Pete explained. "If I try, Karen threatens me with complicated Math."
Walt held up a hand, getting his attention. "Why is that?"
"I was at school while in pain, trying to have normality, Walt. I kept saying I was fine until the word lost it's meaning to everyone, including myself."
"No wonder she acts like an older sister to you," Nick said and Pete craned his neck to look at him with a slight smile. "That's not a bad thing, you know."
"I'm an only child," Pete reminded him. "This..."
This would have been hard to get his mind around, Walt realized. Never mind coming from a background of neglect...
59. Dies
In the refuge of their bedroom, Helen lay curled up to him under the covers, drawing patterns with her hand on the sheet. It was one thing to know something had happened in the abstract, entirely another to hear it from the source and understand the pain. "Ever feel like it's not enough?"
"All the time," Walt admitted. "And maybe it isn't."
"Maybe it is," she murmured back at him. "Even if it never feels like it is."
He had to give her that point, there. Too much and not enough at the same time.
60. Story
She stood in the doorway to what had been the guest room and simply watched as he put newly washed clothes in the dresser drawers. Her attention drifted around the room and that was when she noticed the pictures on the bedside tables, a personal touch that made the bedroom seem more like his than a blank canvass.
Pete noticed her looking with a smile and shrugged. "It's good to have them close?"
Helen nodded. "It is, Pete. Very good." She'd not missed, either, that he'd set pictures on the dresser, to either side of the still-unused album. Small steps to think about bigger ones, indeed. "Where are your uniforms?"
"Closet," Pete admitted after a long silence, like he'd not expected her to ask. "They were getting wrinkled in the bags."
She smiled at that. "Good place for them, then."