Jack stood at the window long after the taillights vanished, one bulb still blinking like a heart that refused to die. Rain hammered the glass in cold, relentless fists. His breath fogged the pane; his forehead stayed pressed to it until the chill numbed skin and bone alike. A tear slid down, warm for one heartbeat, then turned ice.
"You are my brother," he whispered, voice cracking like thin frost. "Not blood, but every scar you wore so I could keep breathing. You looked at the wreck of me and said, Worth saving."
Silence answered, thick enough to choke on.
Five. Barefoot in moonlit grass, clutching a stolen comet-feather that smelled of his mother's hair. Elisa, six, fireflies crowning her wild curls. "Share." He offered. She snapped it, gave him the brighter half. "Now we're even," she laughed, and the night shrank to the size of their joined hands.
Six. Thunder nights. She climbed the ivy soaked, crawled under his blanket smelling of rain and stolen sugar, pressed her small hot palm over his frantic heart. "Storms are noise. I'm your quiet." She sang off-key until the sky gave up.
Seven. Greenhouse thick with rot and tears. She sat in the dirt, laid dead petals in his lap like fallen stars. "You're not less. You're the only light I want to live inside." She carved their initials into the oak, cut her palm, painted the heart with their blood. "Forever tastes like iron and summer." He kissed her, clumsy, desperate, believing.
Forever lasted twenty-one days. Then gates slammed, fire rose, everything burned.
Now, twenty-four and hollow, Jack pressed his bleeding palm to the glass and left a red ghost.
Aurora's voice drifted from the hallway, thin, alive only because Steve had paid in flesh and grace. "He was crying so hard he couldn't see, Lis. Begging me to stay. For you."
Elisa made a sound like something inside her snapped clean in half. She stared at her purpled knuckles, felt again the heat of Steve's cheek giving under her hand. Guilt flooded her, scalding, relentless. She folded, arms around her ribs, rocking on the cold tile while sobs tore out of her ugly, wet, unstoppable. "I hit the one person who would burn the universe down to bring me home."
The words weren't enough. They would never be enough.
She clawed at her own arms, nails digging crescents into skin, as if she could rip the memory out through flesh. "I saw a monster and it was my own reflection wearing his face," she rasped. Anger came next—white-hot, blinding—directed only at herself. She wanted to scream, to shatter every window, to drag the storm inside so it could punish her the way she deserved. But the anger collapsed under its own weight and became a different animal: a howling, helpless love that had nowhere to go. She pressed her bruised hand to her mouth to stifle the next sob and tasted his blood still ghosting her skin.
Jack couldn't move. He wanted to run into the storm, throw himself in front of the car, scream until his throat bled that he chose Steve now, always. But fifteen years of silence had turned his feet to stone. He slid down the wall, curled into the boy he used to be, and whispered, "I let you carry the sky. Come home so I can hold it for once."
The whisper grew into something feral. Frustration exploded in his chest—rage at his own cowardice, at every night he let Steve take the beating, every morning he woke up safe while Steve limped. He punched the floor, knuckles splitting open anew, blood smearing the tiles like an accusation. "I was supposed to grow up and stand in front of you!" he shouted to the empty room, voice raw and breaking. "Just once, damn it, just once!" Love and guilt braided so tight he couldn't tell which was strangling him. He curled tighter, forehead to knees, and cried the way only people who have never been the strong one cry—loud, snotty, ashamed of the noise but unable to stop.
Miles away, tires hissed on wet asphalt.
Steve drove with the window down, rain needling the swollen handprint like needles of ice. Half his grace gone, the hollow inside him rang cold and cathedral-empty.
He thought of Aurora. She would never know her heart stopped three times and he restarted it with shaking hands and snot dripping onto her shirt, mouth pressed to her hair, begging like a child: "Don't leave me the last one who remembers how to love them right." He had promised every remaining year of his life for one more of hers. He had cried so hard the world blurred to salt.
The road signs blurred too. He almost missed the turnoff to the cliff road where they used to watch meteor showers as kids. He took it anyway, tires screaming.
He parked at the edge, engine ticking itself to death in the rain. Walked to the hood, sat on the still-warm metal, and let the storm have him.
Water streamed down his face, mixing with blood and tears until he couldn't tell which was which. He looked up at the black sky and spoke aloud, voice hoarse, furious, loving, broken.
"You were supposed to let me save you too, you bastards. I waited fifteen years for one of you to say, 'Steve, put it down, I've got it now.' Just one time. I would've dropped the whole damn sky for that."
His chest heaved. A roar tore out of him—rage, grief, love so big it had nowhere left to live except in the thunder.
He punched the hood once, twice, metal denting under his fist, knuckles splitting open, blood running warm for one heartbeat before the rain froze it.
Then the roar collapsed into the smallest voice he had.
"I'm still carrying it. I always will. Even if you hate me for it. Even if you're scared of me. I love you more than I love being alive."
He stayed there until the rain soaked him to the bone, until the cold finally reached the hollow place inside and filled it with ice.
He pulled over under a dead streetlamp, killed the engine, and finally broke. Forehead on the steering wheel, shoulders shaking hard enough to rock the car. No sound except the wet click in his throat and the rain punishing the roof.
He cried for Aurora's tiny fist clutching his shirt at four, trusting him to be safety. He cried for every night he held Jack through nightmares and never admitted they were his own. He cried for Elisa's seven-year-old laugh still living behind his ribs like a second heartbeat. He cried because he would burn the rest of himself tomorrow if it kept them breathing one more day.
And because tonight love looked at him and saw a monster.
"I'm so tired," he whispered, eight years old again. "I'm so tired of being the one it's okay to hurt."
He didn't wipe his face. He started the car. He drove into the dark anyway.
Because that is what he did. He carried. Even when the sky finally crushed him.
He sat on the hood until the metal burned cold through his soaked jeans. Rain had stopped hours ago, but the sky kept weeping anyway. He looked at the blood on his split knuckles, his own this time, and laughed once, a sound so small it died before it reached the cliff edge.
Then he spoke to the dark the way he never spoke to them.
"I'm begging now. Fifteen years and I'm finally begging. Take it from me. Take the sky. Take the weight. Take the guilt and the grace and the nights I didn't sleep so you could. Just take it. I can't be your shield anymore if you keep swinging at me."
His voice cracked on the last word and the storm answered with thunder that sounded exactly like a sob.
He pressed his bleeding hands to his face and whispered the thing he had never once said aloud:
"I want to come home too."