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The first time it happens, reality is already reduced to a suggestion. It's the night before her big recital and the only thing keeping her from tripping into the hedges lining the driveway is Henry’s hand on her shoulder, and he’s hardly the paragon of sobriety himself. “Shit,” she mumbles, grabbing onto him to steady herself as a wave of nausea crashes into her.
“Whoa,” he says dumbly—he’s so dumb but he’s the best mistake she’s ever made, she laments. “Are you sure you can get back in through the window by yourself?”
She blinks, hard, trying to convince herself that yes, she is perfectly capable of getting into the window, mostly because her only other option to get in would be to wake up her parents and ask. Evening Natalie had remembered the Valium but not her keys, and they haven’t had a spare under the doormat ever since her mom threw it into the sewer during a particularly bad fit a few months ago.
“Don’t worry,” she tries to say, to perhaps unsuccessful results, “I’ve got this.”
Before he can question her on this, she pats him on the shoulder and strides—stumbles, really—toward the kitchen window on the side of the house. It’s high for a first floor window because their house is built on an incline, but it’s the only one they frequently leave unlocked because it’s the first one to be thrown open when the fire alarm goes off.
At this hour, no one should be around to see her ungracefully kick off a rusted pipe and hoist herself up. Her parents have been turning in earlier than usual ever since her mom started seeing that new therapist four times a week, and their next door neighbors are an elderly couple Natalie seldom even sees leave their home. As long as she doesn’t make too much noise, she should be—
A hollow clang rings out as her foot catches on the handle of a pot left on the stove, sending it hurtling to the floor. She mutters a curse under her breath as she scrambles to get the rest of her body over the threshold.
It’s just her fucking luck the impact cracked the floor tile. She’s about to ponder the odds of her parents not noticing if they haven’t already woken up to the commotion when she hears a creak from the direction of the hallway leading into the kitchen.
Standing in the doorway is a teenage boy—the low lighting obscures most of his features, but she can make out dark, unkempt hair and an angular frame peeking out from beneath an oversized gray hoodie. He is not familiar, but she’d recognize that hoodie anywhere.
“Oh, what the fuck?” both she and the strange boy breathe out at the same time.
Natalie groans, rubbing her eyes. “I’m too high for this,” she grumbles.
He points at her, almost accusingly. “I’m not,” he says.
“Gold star to the hallucination, then,” she deadpans, pinching the bridge of her nose. The shock of knocking over the pot sobered her enough that she feels less like she’s floating through time, but clearly she’s still tripping on something if she’s seeing him now.
That, or it’s not the fault of the drugs. But she’d rather not consider that possibility.
“I’m not the hallucination,” he says. “You are.”
“Incorrect,” she says, moving to set the pot back on the stove. Surely no one pays attention to the state of the floor when cooking, she thinks. Or is it smarter to just leave the pot on the ground and pretend some other force knocked it off the stove?
“I—” She looks back over her shoulder to see the boy leaning heavily against the wall next to him, forehead pressed to the wood paneling. His breathing is visibly labored, hands trembling even as he reaches out to brace them on the wall.
Seemingly to himself, he mumbles, “I am not crazy.”
Of course even her hallucinations have anxiety, Natalie laughs inwardly, though something in her chest twists in empathy, even if she doesn’t believe he’s real. “You’re not the crazy one,” she says after a moment.
He makes a wounded noise, still shaking like a fawn. She swallows.
The sane thing would be to walk away, to ignore the ghost of a boy she’s never known well enough to grieve and sleep off whatever horrible concoction of drugs is thrumming in her veins. But ‘sane’ isn’t a Goodman trait, and he’s blocking the only exit to the room besides the window, so Natalie crosses the room and sighs, “Come on, you have to breathe.”
He shudders through an inhale, and his trembling legs must finally give out on him because he seems to collapse forward. Instinctively, Natalie lunges to grab him by the arm, and he all but buckles into her grasp, his other arm looping around her shoulders, face falling into the crook of her neck and oh, she didn’t expect this. He’s solid. He’s warm.
He pulls back enough to stutter out an apology—he has Mom’s eyes, a hysteric part of her notes—and Natalie shoves him away from her, ears ringing. His back hits the wall with enough force to jostle one of the frames hanging on the wall, and both of their gazes snap over to watch it slide sideways, ever so slightly.
Before she can unstick her feet from the floor, he takes another shaky breath and walks over to silently straighten the frame.
“I don’t get it,” he whispers, not turning his body to face her but angling his chin just enough that she catches a glimpse of dark eyes gleaming with tears. “You didn’t show up when I failed my history midterm, you didn’t show up when Mom freaked out the other day, or when I was high out of my mind yesterday—I don’t get it. Why now?”
She opens and closes her mouth, feeling a bit like she’s missed a step on the stairs. The only response she can get out is a faint, “What?”
He stares at her like he’s waiting for her to suddenly come up with a revelatory response to his rambling, but any semblance of a working brain cell has long since clocked out for the night, so she just shakes her head, tangling a hand in her already-mussed blonde hair. “I need to lay down,” she says, trying to step past him.
“You have her hair,” she hears him mutter as she stumbles by him, making her pause.
“You have her eyes,” she whispers back, not daring to turn around.
He groans. “I know.” He lets out a dry laugh. “Clearly I do, if I’m seeing you too, now.”
And finally, the pieces click in Natalie’s mind. She gets what game her own brain is playing on her.
Natalie whirls around. “You’re—”
The words die on her lips as she realizes there’s no one behind her to hear.
Natalie swallows. It’s fine, she tells herself as she stumbles to her bedroom. It’s just the drugs. She’ll sober up in time for her recital tomorrow, and her parents will show up to watch, and she’ll get that Yale scholarship, and everything will be fine.
Everything is not fine.
Her parents don't show up to her recital, and she frankly wishes the Yale representatives didn't either, given her performance, but she doesn't even get to stew in self-loathing about that because her mother has ensured the title of Household Crisis of The Week goes to her attempt to join Natalie's brother in haunting the rest of them.
Natalie shouldn't be mad. She should be a doting daughter, worried out of her mind for her mother's wellbeing—and she is worried, but that worry is eclipsed by her immutable anger. Of course the timing coincides with her catastrophic recital. Of course Natalie will never be given a chance to just be mad.
The second time she sees him happens the day after her recital.
She leaves the hospital before visiting hours end, just so she has time in the house alone while her father tries to pretend he's keeping it together at his wife's side. It's because she specifically planned for this alone time that she immediately notices the footsteps that shouldn't be present.
She knows it's not her father home early just by the weight of the steps—her dad's steps are always far too heavy for their wood floors, while these ones are lighter, quicker. They lack the trepidation of someone actively trying not to be noticed, but Natalie can tell from the way the person avoids the loudest floorboards in the hallway that it's someone used to sneaking around this house.
Really, Natalie doesn't need to go through the process of elimination to arrive at her answer, but she's perhaps still less shocked than someone else in her position would be when the boy she never should've met walks into the kitchen in the middle of her making a sandwich for herself.
"You better not need food because these are the last slices of bread," she huffs, "and we're out of everything else."
He stares at her for a moment before shaking his head. "I got food on the way home from the hospital."
"I was going to do that but I was out of cash," she says, setting her sandwich in the toaster oven to warm it. "So, yay, stale sandwich using the nasty cheese product that never expires for dinner." She makes an unenthused jazz hands motion, wondering how she's gotten to the point in her life where this makes any sense. No, scratch that, it still doesn't make sense, but she's so fucking done with it already. When did this become normal to her?
He snorts. "I had one of those while high once and I still thought it was shit," he says.
"See, that," Natalie says, waving a still-wrapped slice of cheese in his direction, "is how I know you're from my brain because Mom's golden boy would never be caught doing drugs."
He raises an eyebrow, slanting her one of those smug little grins that only teen boys can give. "Who says I've been caught?" he replies, walking over and taking a seat on the opposite side of the island, facing away from her. He drums his fingers on the fake marble, and Natalie instantly clocks it as following common time. "And anyway, I think it's more evidence you're from my brain instead because it makes a lot more sense for me to have the drug habit than you."
"I'm making a sandwich in the same room my mom decided to off herself," she snaps. "I think I've got a good excuse for the drug thing."
"You do realize that applies to both of us, right?" He tilts his head back over his shoulder, just enough that she must be standing in his periphery. "And I bet you don't have to deal with getting kicked off the football team for your GPA dropping since Mom's decided to imagine you as a child genius," he scoffs.
"Oh, is that what's meant to compete with me fucking up my recital in front of the Yale scouts?" she snarks. "Football, great."
He crosses his arms. "I might've gotten a scholarship off it if I'd been able to play," he says.
"I wish someone had stopped me from going up to play," she replies. "Would've saved me from embarrassing myself in front of a hundred people."
"The whole team heard me freak out at the coach about being dropped," he counters. "You might have more people but mine were all people whose opinions I cared about."
"My—" she stumbles over naming what Henry is for a second, "—not-boyfriend was there for mine."
He lets out a dry laugh. "Same."
This is pointless, Natalie thinks, leaning into the island and pointedly not looking at him. She can feel his gaze on her. He's not real, she tries to tell herself. They could keep going back and forth until her father comes home and realizes he has not one, but two fucked-up women in the household.
It's stupid to waste her time arguing with what she knows is just her own brain—there's no other option for what he could be, even if part of her wishes he was real because that part of her wants to fight with a real person right now. She—
"I wish you were real," she blurts out, then falters.
His breath hitches. "I think," he says slowly, voice hoarse, "that we must both be all kinds of fucked to want to be around each other after that."
Natalie bites her lip hard, just to feel the sting. "Runs in the family, I guess," she says.
He laughs, burying his face in his hands. "Yeah." She thinks she hears him sniffle quietly as he shakes his head and whispers, "I don't—I don't even know your name. No one ever says it."
She shudders through a breath. Carefully, she steps around the island, until she's standing a mere pace away from him, watching him move to grip the countertop with white-knuckled fingers.
"I don't know yours either," she admits.
Silently, he turns to look at her. His eyes are familiar.
For a long moment, they stare at each other, neither moving. Then, like the ripping of a band-aid, he hops off the countertop, feet landing on the tile with a quiet one-two tap but he remains with his back leaning on the island, as if terrified his feet are going to give way beneath him again. Her hand twitches with the urge to steady him, and she balks at herself. She's long since accepted that touch isn't something she can afford to crave; doing so only leads to disappointment. She knows this, and she knows she doesn't know his name, so there's no point—
"Gabe." She freezes as he takes a trembling step toward her. "Gabriel, if you want what's on my birth certificate," he says, a faint laugh escaping him, and it strikes her how breathy it sounds.
"That's a shit name," she says because if she says something else, she's humoring the ghost. Except he doesn't feel like a ghost or a hallucination or a lie anymore. He's breathing. He's alive, a voice in her head screams.
She watches him wilt at the response, a palpable look of disappointment settling on his face that does nothing to soothe the part of her trying to be reasonable. There is no comfort in knowing her brother is dead, and there is no comfort in letting herself believe he is alive because he's not. But he feels as real as she does now, and there's no one around to tell her otherwise. There is no one around to catch her as she steps forward and says, "Natalie's written on mine."
Gabe makes a quiet noise, and Natalie isn't sure if it's right to call it pained or relieved. "Hi Nat—" he chokes for a second, then mumbles, quieter, "—Natalie. Natalie."
She crumbles with a wounded, "I hate you." Her voice breaks on the utterance. Everything is shattering, everything is falling apart. "I hate you, why couldn't you just leave me alone? Why did—"
"Why did you have to die?" he breaks in.
Natalie can't help but laugh. "That's my line," she says.
"I said it first," he says, stubborn. Solid. Natalie flinches.
He's matched her beat for beat, story for story, and yet he doesn't feel like a mirror image. He doesn't feel like an echo—he feels like a harmonizing voice, an equal on the stage.
She sees herself in him, and yet, she can't see him as herself. They are simply two sides of the same coin, minted from the same metal: same mom, same dad.
Siblings.
She shakes her head, screwing her eyes shut. "I hate you," she repeats. "I wish I'd had the chance to hate you."
"I wish—"
His voice cuts off abruptly. She blinks her eyes open, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he's gone. Natalie stares at the empty space, trying not to wonder.
Mom keeps his birth certificate in a box with his old baby clothes. Natalie's known this for years, but she's never looked, not once. She's never wanted to—she's always feared that more knowledge would only be more ammo for an aching brain years down the line. Once she knows, she can't un-know it. Once she knows, she can't ignore it.
Natalie opens the box.
With shaking hands, she undoes the clasp on a faded manila envelope. The paper gets caught on the side as she pulls it out. Her breath gets caught in her chest as she reads her brother's name aloud for the first time. "Gabriel Goodman."
She bites her lip. "Gabriel," she whispers to the empty room, testing the name on her lips. "Gabe. Gabe."
She puts everything back the way she found it. It doesn't feel the same.
The third time it happens is a day into their mom's new ECT schedule.
It's just after four in the morning—Natalie had been too distracted to concentrate on her physics homework last night and had finally given up at midnight, resolving to wake up early to finish it.
Admittedly, not much waking up had to happen. She's gotten a generous two hours of sleep, and the problems in her notebook still make next to no sense to her, and because she's not nearly ready to give up on it and write down some bullshit, she's snuck down to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee instead.
She can hear the water boiling when Gabe tumbles through the open kitchen window. He looks at her, still dressed in her rumpled sleep t-shirt with her hair in a messy heap atop her head and barely bats an eye. "Ah, it's a dead sister day," he remarks.
"Dead brother day," she returns flippantly.
He unzips his hoodie and the too-bright kitchen light makes it very clear very quickly that his shirt is on inside out and backwards. "I do feel like death," he says.
"Where the fuck did you come from?"
"I thought we were over the whole 'oh no I've gone crazy' thing already," he says.
Natalie rolls her eyes. "I meant 'what the hell were you doing that you're crawling through the window at the crack of dawn looking like you got dressed in the dark?'"
"Oh." He snorts. "Stayed over at a friend's house."
"With your shirt off."
He hums in response, glancing down at himself. "I don't think this is my shirt, actually."
Natalie lets out a disbelieving laugh. "Scandalous," she deadpans. He gives her a wry smile.
"I'm an awful influence, huh?"
"Well, you're not telling me to kill myself yet, so better than expected, I guess," she replies, and he winces.
To his credit, he recovers quickly, playing it off with a wave of his hand. "You seem like you'd be the good kid, anyway," he says. "I'm allowed to be the fuck-up."
She stares at him. "Did you forget about the drugs and the shattering a tile while sneaking in through the window high out of my mind?"
Gabe chuckles, toeing at the broken tile. "No, I remember that," he says. "I've done worse, though. Can't show you the proof since this isn't my version of the house, but you're gonna have to take my word for it that there's at least one vase never seeing the light of day again."
She pauses. "Not your version of the house?" she repeats slowly.
"Did you not notice that before?" he asks, tilting his head to the side.
"How would I have noticed that?" she sputters. "You just said you're always the one who comes here."
He hums in thought. "I dunno, I thought a genius like you would've figured out that if I'm not from your reality, I had to be coming from somewhere," he says, moving to sit on the counter. "Unless you still thought I was a hallucination, but I really thought we were past that after the names thing."
Natalie pinches the bridge of her nose. It's too fucking early to be tackling high school physics problems, let alone—what even is this, a multiverse problem?
"So, what, you just randomly disappear from your world into mine like twice a month?" she asks.
Gabe shrugs. "I don't really know how it works," he says. "All I know is this tile isn't broken when you're not in here with me. Plus the one family picture in the hall actually has me instead of you in it. Those are really the only tells besides, y'know, seeing you moping."
"You don't feel anything weird when it happens?"
"Do you?" he counters.
She shakes her head. "No, but you're the one who thinks he's reality-jumping or whatever," she says.
"I just walk into a room sometimes and find my dead sister making coffee at four in the morning; I don't know shit," he laughs. "We could both just be in some fucked-up drug comas or something—I just think the alternate universe thing is cooler and less likely to give me another panic attack."
Natalie thinks that thinking too hard about either option is liable to give her a panic attack, so she throws her hands up and says, "You know what, sure. I like the explanation where neither of us is having a mental break."
"That's the spirit!" he says, snapping in her direction. Natalie rolls her eyes.
She asks, "So, are you not actually sober or are you just a freak when you're not having a panic attack?"
"Dealer's choice," he replies with a smirk.
Natalie says, "So, both."
"Yeah, probably."
She snorts. "I'm guessing you also raided Mom's happy cabinet?"
"And apparently got tattled on by her dreams," Gabe huffs. "Honestly, I think that's the most motherly instinct she's ever had with me."
"Same here," she laughs. "I bet Hallucination-Me's gotten more hugs in the past week than I have in my entire life."
He lets out a dry chuckle. "Now, now, let's be realistic—she's probably gotten more than both of us, combined."
"Well, good for her," Natalie drawls.
There's a pause as both of them snicker to themselves. Gabe swings his legs up onto the counter, shifting so that he's sitting crosslegged with his elbow leaning on his knee.
"You're going to get so much dirt on the counters," she says, shaking her head.
He shrugs. "Not like I make food on these ones anyway," he points out.
"There's literally three open chairs," she says.
Gabe makes a show of shaking his head. "The counter's superior. I get to look down on everyone from up here."
"I'm the only one in here," she deadpans.
He grins. "And I'm looking down at you, aren't I?"
She rolls her eyes hard enough that it makes him burst into laughter, then hoists herself up onto the kitchen island.
"I'm still taller than you," he singsongs.
"What are you, eight?" she asks.
He laughs. "It would be embarrassing if an eight year old was taller than you at—I'm guessing you're also sixteen?"
She nods. "Seventeen in March," she says, adjusting herself so that she's kneeling, therefore just tall enough to be looking down on him instead.
As she's doing so, the coffee maker beeps, startling her enough that she has to catch herself on the chair next to her. She looks up to find Gabe mid-reach for her, which he quickly tries to play off by clearing his throat and commenting, "Coffee's done."
She gets down from the counter—Gabe's gaze follows her the whole time—and goes to grab a mug from the dishwasher. She hesitates after picking up her usual mug. "Think you'll explode if you drink coffee from another world?" she asks.
He pauses. A small smile quirks at the corner of his mouth. "I'll take one for the team and find out," he offers.
Natalie hums and pulls out a second mug, setting it on the counter next to hers.
They talk until their father—Natalie's version of their father—wakes up and comes down to the kitchen for breakfast. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gabe disappears the second before he walks in the door.
"You're up early," he says in lieu of a greeting.
She shrugs. "Figured I'd get a headstart to the day," she replies, standing from her seat.
He doesn't comment on the two mugs when she sets them in the sink. She's not sure if it's because he doesn't notice or because he doesn't want to deal with it. It works out all the same, she supposes.
By the time their fourth encounter happens, Natalie has a mental list of things she's learned about Alive Gabe.
He has the same birth year as her, but the same day as her Gabe would've—though, there's an odd sense of disconnect thinking of him as separate from the Gabe she could've grown up with. She tries not to think about it.
His equivalent of Henry is a boy on his school's swim team who notoriously hates 'the institution of high school football.' She frankly knows more than she'd like about his 'nice laugh' and 'infuriatingly bright eyes,' but Gabe refuses to tell her his name in case he exists in Natalie's world, too.
He's annoyingly likeable, but she's heard enough about siblinghood to know she should keep that one to herself.
He's a pickier eater than she thinks she ever was. He only likes his pancakes if they're still a little raw in the center—Natalie calls him a freak of nature for this one. He doesn't drink soda because the carbonation 'burns his throat'—Natalie calls him a baby for this one. He doesn't like bell peppers when they're cooked but is perfectly fine biting into one raw—she calls him a freak again for this one, then has to wrestle a bell pepper out of his hand before he can take a bite out of it in front of her to spite her.
He's just as scared as her. She thinks this fact gives her more comfort than it should.
"Have you noticed Mom forgetting things more than usual?"
She's in the middle of loading the dishwasher when he speaks up behind her, worrying his lip between his teeth.
"She's barely said a word to me since she started the treatment," she says, rinsing off a plate. "I think the last time we actually had a conversation was the 'her telling me not to do drugs' one, and that was, like, two weeks ago."
He furrows his brows. "She hasn't said much to me either—but this morning, she gave me a weird look like she wasn't sure why I was there."
Natalie pauses. "Fuck, she might've done the same to me a few days ago," she says.
"Do you think that's… normal?" Gabe asks. "I wasn't really paying attention when they told me about the details because I was still mad about the game."
"Maybe," she says. "I don't think anyone in our family knows the definition of normal, though." She sets another plate in the dishwasher.
He hums in thought. "You're right," he says, and she glances over her shoulder to see that some of the tension has left his shoulders. He hops up onto the counter next to the dishwasher. "I just—I don't know. I have a bad feeling."
"I think that's both of our default states, Gabe," she says with a dry laugh.
"…Also probably right," he says. He shakes his head. "Do you think the ECT will actually work?"
She turns the water off to give him a flat look. "Do I look qualified to answer that question?" she asks.
"Hey, you're two for two at the moment," he points out.
Natalie sighs. "I don't know," she admits. "It'd be nice if it did but—"
"—we're not allowed to have nice things in this house?" he finishes. "Yeah. I'd call it too good to be true but I don't think anything I've heard about the process makes it sound good."
"I read so many articles about it the night they signed the papers," Natalie admits. "Freaked myself out so bad I needed a Xanax to sleep."
Gabe runs a hand through his hair. "I don't remember what I did that night, which means I probably also took something," he says with a nervous laugh. After a moment, he asks, "Do you think she'd still be like this if we'd grown up together?"
"You're full of questions today," she comments. "And not the fun kind."
He winces. "I think too much about stuff, I guess," he says. "I can do fun questions, uh—what's your favorite color?"
"That's your idea of a fun question? What is this, a bad date?"
Gabe slants her a pointed look. "I would be concerned if it was a good date," he retorts.
"Gross," she says, wrinkling her nose. "Yeah, okay. I don't know, I've had other things to think about than my favorite color since I was, like, ten."
"Mine's green," he says with a shrug. "What was it before, then?"
She's quiet for a moment. "Yellow," she admits.
He snorts. "Like piss?" When she shoots him a glare, he laughs and waves a placating hand. "I had to, I had to! Yellow's nice—it's, like, the color of sunshine."
"You're an asshole," she huffs, but there's no heat behind it.
"So I've been told," he says. "Would you rather find a person living in your attic or ten thousand roaches?"
She stares at him. "What the fuck?"
"I'd take the person," he says in lieu of a response.
She dries her hands just so she can pinch the bridge of her nose in exasperation. He stares at her expectantly.
Natalie sighs. "It's easier to make sure one person's gone than count all ten thousand roaches," she concedes.
"Thank you!" he exclaims, clapping his hands. "Can you believe half my team said roaches when I asked?"
She shrugs. "Honestly, I'd move if I knew one of those two things was up there. Burn the house down 'by accident' and collect the insurance money if I could get away with it."
"Okay, that—that's a bit much for a sober answer," he says with a chuckle. "If I ever need to stash a body, I'm calling you."
"Calling your dead sister to help you stash a body is definitely a move the cops won't expect," she says.
He grins. "You'd totally break me out of jail if I asked, though, right?"
"Given that I've never been to your world, I don't think I'd be of much help," she says, closing the dishwasher before remembering she hasn't added the detergent yet. She goes to tell Gabe to move so she can grab some, but he seems to realize what she's doing and slides over for her.
"If you could, though," he says. "You would because you—" Gabe catches himself mid-sentence, an awkward silence descending upon them as Natalie freezes with her head half buried in a cupboard with a cobweb and a box of dishwasher pods.
He clears his throat. "Never mind," Gabe tries to say, but it comes out painfully forced.
Slowly, Natalie pulls her head out of the dark cupboard to look up at him. Her brother is fidgeting with the string of his hoodie when she bites her lip and tells him, in the most casual voice she can muster, "I would." He stiffens. She looks away and shrugs, slipping the pod into its compartment and shutting the dishwasher again. "Just so I can laugh at you for getting caught, you know."
"Of course," he says. It only comes out a little choked.
Natalie turns on the dishwasher to save them both from the silence, but she knows both of their brains are anything but quiet as it sputters to life.
Part of her laughs—isn't that a crazy thought? She knows her dead brother well enough to know what he must be feeling.
Maybe she's more like Gabe than she thought because her next passing thought is another paralyzingly impossible question:
Would we have loved each other if we'd grown up together?
When Mom returns from her latest ECT appointment later that evening, she stutters over Natalie's name. She has to bite back a snide remark about how even her dead brother from another world knows that one. She wonders if he's doing the same, a world away.
When Mom returns from her latest ECT appointment later that evening, she stutters over Gabe's name. He catches himself before he asks if she at least remembers her other kid, before he asks if dying is the only way he can ever be held by her. He wonders if his sister's doing the same, a world away.
The fifth time they meet, Gabe knows it will be the last.
He's lingering in the hallway like a ghost as he listens to his mother pack her bags. All he'd wanted was a glass of water, but then he heard the crying, and—
His father chokes on a sob, and even from out here, Gabe can tell he's talking to the empty kitchen counter as he asks, "Why didn't you go with her?"
—it feels like a shudder runs through the universe itself. He can't see anything through the darkness but behind him he hears a quiet, "Oh."
Natalie must be close to tears; he can hear it as she whispers, "I think my world's a bit ahead of yours. I just came from—" she hesitates, "—my version."
"I don't suppose it has a happy ending?" he laughs weakly.
The shadow of his sister shifts. It catches him off guard when pale arms come to wrap around him, a familiar tangle of curls pressing into the crook of his neck, but his arms shoot up to return the hug as if by instinct. He wishes they could've done this enough for it to be instinct. "One day," she vows.
The embrace ends too quickly as that same shivering feeling jolts down his spine, now. He can tell Natalie feels it too.
"I'm not you," he whispers. "I'm not a genius. I'm not—I can't." He's not ready to lose her. He's not ready to grieve her.
She chokes on a wet laugh, wiping her nose on her sleeve. "I'm just as fucked-up as you and you know it," she says fiercely. "And we're both going to be fine because we have to be. We have to. You know that."
In the kitchen, he hears his dad gasp out an unmistakable name. "Nat. Natalie." She exhales shakily.
Gabe grasps out blindly for her hand one last time. He squeezes it, hard.
"It'll be good," she says with a sniffle. "You'll see."
"Thanks, Sunshine," he whispers.
Too soon, her warm hand fades beneath his touch. He swallows, hand falling limply to his side.
His sister is gone from this world, but he's not. The world is dark, but it doesn't have to be. He's not fine, but he doesn't have to be—not yet, anyway. He can grieve his ghosts, then lay them to rest. He can live. He will.
He hopes that in another world, his sister will, too.
Gabe takes a long, deep breath. Then, he steps into the kitchen, searching for a light.