One Shots 3.0 [boyxboy]

Blood

It's not like Alec and I had ever been particularly close, growing up, so I'm not sure what it was, sitting in his room sharing a joint one evening that summer, that made me ask, 'So, do you think you'd wanna come and visit over Christmas, maybe? I'll buy your ticket.'

I mean, I can think of a few reasons. I'd already told my parents I wouldn't be home for the holidays that year, claiming I couldn't afford it (a lie - I just didn't want to have to do that journey more than once every twelve months), but that didn't mean I necessarily wanted to spend it alone.

And we'd been getting on okay for a couple hours, so I was feeling some fraternal bonding, I guess.

But mostly I think I was just high.

Alec took another drag and exhaled, and I wondered whether he was gonna be pissed - my brothers, and I, and everyone in our family, have sharp tempers and it wouldn't surprise me if Alec got offended that I thought he couldn't afford his own airfare. Plus, the offer was definitely coming out of left-field for him (an expression I've learned since moving to North America that has something to do with sport but means unexpected) because it's not like we've ever, in our twenty-two years of brotherhood, spent a week alone together just hanging out.

But he just shrugged and said, 'Sure.'

I thought maybe he was just high as well - he was definitely high - so I didn't exactly make tracks on booking his flight, but a week later, when I was already ensconced back in my apartment on the other side of the planet, he sent me a Facebook message with a meme of Sad Pepe and the caption, 'Trey's face when he realises you're flying me out for Christmas and not him.'

So I bought the ticket and told him to tell Mom and Dad that he paid for half. If they wondered where their broke-ass college kid got that kind of disposable income, they didn't ask me.

In the weeks leading up to his arrival I wondered what the fuck I'd gotten myself into. In terms of dealing with our anger problems, Alec had always been a little stunted; I figured this probably had something to do with his being the middle child, but even though he's only a year older than me I still sometimes get anxious thinking about the reign of terror he maintained over our house when we were teenagers. He finally went completely off the rails around age nineteen, but by then I'd already moved out for college and it wasn't like we nurtured weekly FaceTime calls or texted every day just to check in - I lost track of what he was doing and how he was doing, and when I got a job straight out of university on the other side of world for software engineering I took it.

Mom and Dad had kept me up to date on the basics; they wrangled him into therapy and threatened to kick his ass out if he didn't stop spending all his time with gang bangers and drug addicts, and he eventually went back to school and was now a year out from graduating. From what I'd seen over my week-long visit in July he'd mellowed out some, but there had been a decent volume of marijuana involved so I couldn't use it as an accurate litmus test.

Then again, it wasn't like I couldn't get pot here.

I couldn't ask Mom and Dad to vouch for him because they'd just panic and freak everyone out; I thought about asking Trey but he's five years older than Alec and checks in even less than I do. So I was just going to have to wing it.

I made up the couch for him to sleep on and dragged my space heater out from the back of the closet; it gets cold even in western in Canada in winter and I didn't want to have to find out how Alec dealt with discomfort.

Not that it did much good; when I met him at the airport he'd just gotten off a fourteen hour journey with two layovers and looked grumpy, scowling at his fellow passengers as he made his way through Arrivals.