The Distance Between Us Was Always Love: Part One
Pairings: chessa subbiondo x hollis’ sister!reader, brother!hollis x sister!reader
based off the film ‘waves’ (2019)
The summer y/n turned seventeen, everything felt like it was happening at a thousand miles per hour.
Hollis had installed a new sound system in his truck—the bass so heavy it rattled the cup holders, so heavy you felt it it’ll your sternum before you heard it with your ears—and he’d blast it every morning on the way to practice, windows down, the los angeles heat already thick and pressing before seven a.m. y/n sat in the passenger seat with her head tipped back against the headrest, watching telephone poles blur past like a metronome, watching the sky go from pink to white to the flat, blinding blue of a summer that intended to be remembered.
This was the season everything was going to change. y/n could feel it the way you feel weather—not see it, not yet, but sense it in the air, in the pressure of things.
Hollis was the kind of person who took up space and made you grateful for it.
Broad-shouldered, loud-laughing, the kind of magnetic that comes from genuinely not knowing how appreciated you are. He moved through the world like it was glad to have him— and mostly, it was. People turned when he walked into rooms. Coaches remembered his name after meeting him once. Strangers at gas stations struck up conversations and walked away feeling like they’d made a friend.
He was y/n’s older brother. Loving him was the easiest thing in the world, even when it was also the most exhausting.
“You’re not focused,” he said one morning, eyes on the road, one hand loose on the steering wheel.
“you’re thinking about Chessa.”
y/n didn’t answer, which was enough of an answer. Hollis laughed— that big, rolling laugh that started in his chest and took over his whole face— turning the music up louder, and that was the end of it. He never pushed. That was another thing about Hollis; he knew exactly when to stop.
Chessa came into y/n’s life the way a tide comes in; slowly, then all at once, then so completely that it became impossible to remember what the shore had looked like before.
She wore her hair down most of the time, and it moved when she walked, and she always seemed to tuck it behind her ear when she was thinking. y/n had locked this away without a second thought. Had locked it away a lot of things without meaning to— the way she bit the cap of her pen during tests, the way she laughed at things other people didn’t notice. The way rain smelled different near the water than near the highway, she’d once said, and y/n had stopped and actually thought about it and realized she was right, she was completely right, and something about that had felt like a key turning in a door lock.
Three years of sitting near her, talking to her, borrowing her notes and returning them with comments scribbled in the margins that became their own private language. Three years before it hit all at once during a bonfire sophomore year— the firelight on her face, her hair pulled over one shoulder, her laughing at something someone said— and y/n thought; oh, it’s you. it’s been you the whole time.
They stayed up until four in the morning that night on Chessa’s back porch. The kind of talking that isn’t about the words—it’s about the staying, the willingness to keep being in the same place as someone even when the night gets cold and late and there’s no good reason left to stay except that you want to. The sky went from black to bruised purple to the tender gray of almost-morning. y/n reached over and took her hand.
Neither of them said anything about it.
The thing about Hollis— the thing underneath all the light, underneath the laugh and the ease and the way rooms changed when he entered them— was pressure.
Their father, Callan, had built something from nothing. A business, a name, a life that bore no resemblance to the life he’d started with. He was proud of it in the way only people who’ve had nothing can be proud of something— completely, protectively, with a fierceness that sometimes curdled into control. He wanted Hollis to carry it forward. Wanted him faster, stronger, better than Callan himself had been. Every dinner became a report card. Every practice was a referendum on work ethic, on discipline, on whether or not Hollis was taking seriously the opportunities that had been built for him, don’t you understand that, they were built for you.
y/n watched Hollis absorb all of it across the dinner table. Watched him translate it into the only language available; work harder, push through, don’t stop, don’t let them down.
His shoulder had been wrong— hurting for months.
y/n was the only one who knew. She’d seen Hollis wince getting out of the truck after practice, seen him stand too still in the shower like the hot water was the only thing holding him together. Seen him swallow ibuprofen before games like they were breath mints, two, sometimes three, washing them down with a sports drink and pulling his jersey over his head, becoming, again, the person everyone needed him to be.
“You have to tell someone,” y/n said once, in the truck, early morning, before even thinking about turning on the music.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“I said there’s nothing to tell.”
His voice wasn’t angry. That was almost worse. It was just closed. A door with no handle on y/n’s side.
That was the deal between them— they told each other the truth, they fought about it, they loved each other anyway, and they came back. It had always worked that way. The loop always closed.
Until the truth became too big for that.
y/n and Chessa had been together for four months when the season started to turn.
They’d spend evenings at the water, Chessa with her hair loose and moving with the breeze, y/n beside her close enough that their shoulders touched. She’d bring her sketchbook sometimes— she was always drawing things, small things, the texture of flowers, the shape a wave made at the exact moment before it broke— and y/n would watch her work and feel something that was too large and too quiet to be called anything simple.
“You’re staring,” she’d say, not looking up.
She’d look up then, a small smile tucking into the corner of her mouth, and tuck her hair behind her ear, and y/n would feel it again— that enormous quiet thing. The feeling of being exactly where you were supposed to be.
It should have been enough to hold onto. Later, y/n would understand that it was— that Chessa had been solid ground all along, and that the problem was never her. The problem was everything y/n couldn’t say out loud, everything building up inside like water behind a dam, looking for any crack.
The problem was the pressure.
Callan called a family meeting in October.
y/n sat at the kitchen table across from Hollis and watched her brother’s face do something careful and controlled, the same face he made in the last minutes of a close game— still, focused, not letting anything through that he didn’t mean to let through.
Their father talked about opportunity. About windows. About what happened to people who didn’t take what was offered to them with both hands. He talked about recruitment. About scouts. About what this season meant.
Hollis nodded at all of it. Yes sir. I understand. I know what this means.
y/n looked at the way he held his right are slightly away from his body, the small unconscious accommodation he’d built around the pain, and felt something cold move through her.
After Callan left the room, y/n looked at Hollis across the table.
“Don’t.” he said quietly.
“I know what I’m doing.” He stood up, chair scraping the tile. “I know what i’m doing y/n. Just let me do it.”
He disappeared upstairs. y/n sat at the empty table alone listening to the house settle around her and tried to figure out how to help someone who didn’t want to be helped.
The night everything broke, y/n was on the phone with Chessa.
Lying across her bed, shoes still on, talking about nothing— about a movie Chessa wanted to see, whether the beach would be crowded that weekend, the way the light had been doing something strange all afternoon, that specific lighting that makes everything look like a memory while it’s still happening. Chessa’s voice was easy in y/n’s ear. Familiar. The way certain sounds become a part of your days without you noticing until suddenly you can’t imagine the silence that would be left without them.
The sound of it was very wrong. Not loud— that would’ve been almost better. It was too deliberate. Too final. The sound of something being closed rather than shut.
She set the phone face-down on the bed. Went into the hallway, and stood at the top of the stairs.
Later, she would not be able to reconstruct that exact moment. Memory doesn’t preserve things chronologically when they’re broken— it preserves them in pieces, in the wrong order, the wrong sizes. What they would keep; the look on hollis’ face, standing in the entryway below, which was not rage and not grief but something older and emptier than either, something that had given up on having a name. The particular stillness of the house around him, as if the walls themselves had gone quiet. The way everything after that moment would always be divided into before and after, as cleanly and permanently as a wave that breaks and changes the shape of the shore.
y/n went back to her room.
Chessa’s voice carried through the speakers: “Hey. You okay? What happened?”
y/n opened her mouth. Closed it, and tried again.
The most she could muster out was “I don’t know.”
Which was true. And would remain true for a very long time.
The ocean doesn’t care what it takes with it. It just takes. That’s not considered cruelty— it’s just the nature of force meeting land, pressure finding places where things are at their lowest. The shore always changes. That doesn’t mean it’s different. It just means the water was once there.
Taglist: @2bun22 @badlands-bitchh
a/n: babehs first fic, be nice😅. lowkey had to come up with a name for the dad. putting my grade a essay writing skills to use.
