For a moment, Devon could only look at him. Some truths had arrived so gently they were almost more painful than cruelty. Noah saying he had never stopped loving him should not have surprised him. It should have been something Devon could have accepted without feeling the floor shift beneath his feet. Yet his mind had spent so many years building a courtroom around the absence that evidence to the contrary felt almost obscene. He had become accustomed to interpreting love as something with a limit. A resource that could be exhausted by enough mistakes, enough distance, enough damage. The fact that Noah was sitting there telling him otherwise made every old assumption look cheap and childish.
Devon's fingers remained curled loosely against Noah's shoulder, feeling the warmth of him through the fabric. He found himself thinking of all the nights he had imagined this conversation ending differently. In most of them, Noah was angry. In some, he was indifferent. In the worst ones, he looked at Devon with the exhausted disgust of someone who had finally realized he had spent too much of his life waiting for a person who had never deserved the waiting. None of those imagined versions had accounted for Noah simply loving him. That was the part Devon had never known how to prepare for.
He laughed softly when Noah mentioned Hudson and those stale cookies. The sound broke strangely at the edges. Of course, he remembered them. Hudson had loved those miserable things with the devotion of a starving child. Which, Devon supposed, was probably what he had been. He remembered the three of them sitting around a kitchen table that had always seemed too large for the amount of food on it, Hudson carefully arranging the cookies into little piles and Gavin stealing from his when he thought nobody was looking. Devon had pretended not to notice because it was easier than watching Hudson count them afterward. The thought brought Indiana back with such clarity that Devon could almost smell the old house again. That peculiar mixture of dust, detergent, damp carpet, and whatever chemical sweetness someone had used to make a place feel cleaner than it was. He remembered Noah sitting beside him on the floor with his knees drawn up, both of them whispering about Hudson because speaking his name too loudly had sometimes made the loss feel more real.
They had been children making plans for a future they could not possibly understand. Devon remembered promising Noah they would find Hudson again, promising him with the absolute confidence of someone who had never learned that adults could lie and systems could fail and children could simply disappear into paperwork. Devon thinks that moment was the root of their devotion to a promise.
He remembered the three of them walking home from school beneath the flat grey Indiana sky, Hudson complaining that his shoes were too tight while Noah insisted they were fine, and Devon secretly calculating whether he could afford another pair. He remembered Noah's hand slipping into his when they crossed the street, remembered Hudson running ahead and then doubling back because he had decided neither brother was allowed to get too far away from him. The memories burned because they were beautiful. That was the indecency of it. The past had not been entirely monstrous, and perhaps that was why it had been so difficult to escape. There had been warmth inside the ruin, little islands of tenderness that made the cruelty harder to name. Devon had spent years believing he had abandoned Noah to all of it, but sitting here now, listening to his brother speak with such certainty, he began to understand that leaving had never erased the love he had carried with him.
"I don't know how you can still see that kid in me," Devon admitted after a while. "Sometimes I can't even find him." His voice remained low, stripped of the defensive quality it usually acquired whenever he approached something too close to the bone. "I remember him, but I don't always recognize him." He swallowed, and the muscles in his jaw tightened before relaxing again. "I think, uh, that's what I've been tryin' to do all these years. Find some way to get back to him, like, if I could just become good enough or useful enough, maybe I'd feel like I hadn't ruined everything that came after." He gave a small, humorless breath that was nearly a laugh. "Pretty stupid way to live, when I say it out loud." There was no self-pity in it, only exhaustion. He had spent so much time treating his own existence like a problem that required constant correction that the idea of simply being the person Noah remembered felt almost irresponsible. "When you talk about him like, I don't know, like he's still here... I can almost believe it." Devon lifted his eyes again, and there was something terribly young in his expression. "Maybe he is. Maybe I just buried him under everything I thought I had to become."
Noah's words about sitting in it stayed with him. Settled somewhere beneath the panic, where they might eventually become something useful. Devon had always approached pain like an enemy that needed to be subdued privately; if he could swallow it before anyone noticed, if he could medicate it into silence, if he could work until his body became too tired to remember what his mind was doing, then perhaps it ceased to be real. The pills had only been another version of the same philosophy, another little chemical hand placed over the mouth of something screaming. He could see that now with an awful clarity. He had not wanted to die. He had wanted the noise to stop. He had wanted five minutes in which his body did not feel like a place he had to defend. The distinction mattered, even if it did not excuse what he had done. He looked down at his hands and watched the faint tremor move through them, almost unnoticeable now, as though his body were embarrassed to be caught telling the truth. "I don't know what sitting in it is supposed to look like," he confessed. "I've spent, like, most of my life tryin' to make sure nobody sees me sitting in anything." His mouth tightened into a faint smile. "I guess that's probably why I ended up makin' myself more problems. Efficient in the moment, but still, like, fuckin' stupid." The humor dissolved almost immediately, leaving the truth beneath it exposed. "I'll try, though. Dunno how to do it, but I'll try."
He leaned back, finally allowing some of his weight to settle rather than holding himself rigidly upright. The apartment around them seemed quieter than before, the city reduced to a muted glow beyond the windows. Nothing outside had changed. There was still the problem of his self-medication, the comedown, the shame of having lied about where it came from, and the larger question of what happened next. None of that had disappeared simply because Noah loved him. Love was not medicine, and Devon knew better than to turn it into another impossible burden his brother would have to carry. Yet something had changed, something small enough that he was almost afraid to touch it. He no longer felt quite so much like a man standing alone at the edge of something enormous. "Okay," he murmured, staring at the city through the translucent curtains. "We can sit in it." His throat tightened, but he kept going. "Just... don't let me turn it into another thing that I have to be good at." He finally looked toward Noah again, the smallest trace of a smile appearing through the exhaustion. "I'm startin' to think I've had enough of tryin' to earn my way out of things." For once, Devon allowed himself to remain exactly where he was, imperfect and frightened and still shaking, without immediately reaching for something that would make him disappear from the room.
