How different would slaos would be if Holt siblings grew along with Lance, Hunk and Loraine??
Matt is seventeen when they move to Veradera.
He’s hardly keen on the idea—Houston born and raised; the concept of some quiet, sleepy seaside town on the East Coast is an anathema to him, and he shares none of his parents’ enthusiasm for the peace and serenity of it all.
The place is a cobbled together mess of grand, newly built homes facing the water, protected as private by the rising seaside cliffs, and leftover neighborhoods of older homes a ten-minute walk down crumbling sidewalks and sandy pathways to the beach. It’s a mismatch of weatherworn family homes and bungalows, mom-and-pop ice cream and fish & chip shops, and the upscale construction projects looking to capitalize on a relatively unspoiled place.
“It’s rustic,” his dad says when they first drive through town.
Matt thinks of the Houston bustle and the constant loud chatter of his former school. “It’s boring,” he sighs, and next to him Pidge cheers her agreement.
He spends three days moping indoors—in their house that is neither quite one of those seaside cottages nor of the new designs, but somewhere in between—before his mother kicks him out, with instructions to take Pidge to the park.
“Under duress,” Pidge declares as he walks her there, tiny pigtails bobbing in the seemingly never ending coastal breeze Matt already loathes. “Taking me to the park under duress. I never asked for this!”
Matt wonders where the hell his seven-year-old sister picked up the phrase under duress, and then promptly forgets about said concern when, upon entering the park, a child falls out of a tree and on top of his head.
He screeches, the kid screeches, and somewhere along the way he hears a shout of “Lance!” and looks up to see another kid and a girl about his age, with long hair that snags on the branches and falls in front of her eyes, sitting in the tree.
“I’m ok!” The human projectile he can determine is likely Lance calls back. Matt groans into the dirt where he has landed, and Pidge yells a war cry, picking up a pinecone and chucking it at the girl in the tree in an effort to avenge her brother.
And that’s how they wind up with the McClains, plus one Hunk Garrett, as something like friends.
Really, Matt isn’t very good with people. He’s better than Pidge, not like it’s hard, but for the most part he’s hardly a social butterfly, though that doesn’t stop Loraine and her two shadows invading his life, regardless. Pidge is dragged into friendship by the kids—Loraine’s brother Lance and his constant companion Hunk—and after a few weeks of kicking up a fuss for the sake of it, Pidge decides the boys are all right after all and attaches herself to them as her possessions with that kind of blunt stubbornness she exudes in most everything.
Matt, as her built-in (and severely reluctant) babysitter, is in turn left with Loraine, the boys’ enthusiastic (and more than willing) caretaker. She’s all summer-kissed skin and bright, twinkling laughter, and while he would never have expected a friendship to work between them, it somehow just…does. They sit on top of picnic benches together as the kids play on weekend afternoons, Matt with his book as he glares down at it against the sun and Loraine with her bright smiles and nimble fingers that braid his slightly-too-long hair as she reads over his shoulder when she’s not watching Lance and Hunk, and it’s…good.
It’s weird, and as mismatched as Veradera itself, but that doesn’t stop it any more than it does the town from being as it is. Matt is the slightly quirky teacher’s pet attending college several years early that he drives twenty minutes to every morning, and Loraine is the small town golden girl of the public school that she bikes to come rain or shine. His family is small and spread out across the country. His father is on Garrison payroll and on call for NASA, and his mother works in some shiny building in D.C. doing things he’s not allowed to ask about, for purposes of national security. Loraine’s family is large and tight knit, her father is dead, and her mother makes a mean chocolate cake and is the kindest woman he has ever met.
Matt is an avowed atheist, from a family of avowed atheists. Loraine wears a cross around her neck, but her sister wears a Star of David, and the lot of them can’t quite seem to decide is they’re Catholic like their mother or Jewish like their father to begin with. It gives Matt a headache, and when he tells her as much she laughs, high and true.
Most people won’t talk about those things. Religion. Faith. But Matt is the kind of person where curiosity will outweigh social propriety each time, and Loraine is the kind that believes every question is a good one, so they have many debates over the subject against the setting of the summer sun.
“Don’t you want something to believe in?” Loraine asks him once, grin crooked and face alight in the sun’s glow, and Matt decides if he believes in anything, it’s her—because when he looks at Loraine, he cannot imagine any laws of the universe compelling her to do anything but what she wishes.
When Matt is eighteen, the Garrison offers him a full ride for their upper division research program, like his father before him, and he leaves as Loraine stays. He almost asks her to apply, to come with him, because Matt is a genius as expected for the Holt name, but Loraine is her own kind of quietly brilliant, easily up to the task.
But more than he knows her brilliance, he knows her stubbornness. Veradera—and Lance, always Lance—is her world, and she would never leave so long as people need her here. The unfinished Garrison application she’d told him about once is proof enough of that. She’d made her decision long before he could have impacted it.
When he gets to the Garrison, his roommate notices his picture of the two of them and shoves him, asking about his girlfriend with the pretty eyes.
“She’s my best friend,” he says stubbornly, and then puts the photo away in his desk drawer for good measure, the idea of unknowing eyes seeing Loraine and reducing her to pretty grating in a way he can’t quite understand.
When Matt is nineteen, he gets a call from his mother—hesitant and heartbroken in a way he hasn’t heard her since his grandfather died when he was a child—and his world is yanked out from under his feet.
He comes back for the funeral, and only feels numb as he stares blankly at the casket being lowered, Pidge sniffling and clinging to his arm in a way she hasn’t since she was a toddler. A priest says a quiet sermon, because Loraine was the sister that wore a cross, after all, and Matt feels like standing up and demanding what kind of fucked up God would let someone like Loraine die.
It’s not until it’s all over, and the mourners begin to depart, that it finally begins to sink in that this is really happening. She’s gone and the world will never have her sun again and he wasn’t even here.
At least, he thinks as much until they go to pay their respects to her family, and Matt sees Lance, tiny in his chair, yet so large in his quiet gaze that sees far too much for a child his age. He’s wearing her cross around his neck, hands curled into fists in his lap, and when Matt looks at his face, narrowed eyes and sallow, still sickly skin, he sees that same stubborn determination he knew of summer nights and brash faith.
If the universe couldn’t bend Loraine to its will, Matt decides, it can’t do the same for Lance either, because he sees her in her brother’s eyes, still as powerful and compelling as the tide.
And he doesn’t know whether that reassure or terrifies him more.
Perhaps both. Everything about Veradera, about Loraine, had always been a mesh of impossible combinations, after all.
Why the hell wouldn’t Lance--her shadow, her moon, her love--be the same?
