{✔️} ryden oneshots || lovely 🌹

Boarding school ^part 1^

When Brendon came home with a bloody nose for the third time that week, his mother didn't even ask. She just sighed and said, "Oh, dear." The not again was implied.

Brendon steeled himself against apologising. He'd done that at the beginning, too often. 'Yeah, I just walked into a branch. Mrs Wilkes really needs to trim her hedges. Sorry my shirt got dirty.' Every phone-booth - every lamp-post, bush, and tree in the neighbourhood was unfairly implicated in his injuries. Once, when his t-shirt was more red than white, he even stopped at the 7-Eleven on the corner to buy some washing powder. He'd handed it over to his mother with jam-like blood sliding over his lip. Thinking back, that was probably when she stopped believing inanimate objects had it in for him.

Lately he'd only bought black shirts, so the stains wouldn't show. That brought on a different slew of questions. Was he turning into a 'goth', was he hanging out with different people? - with the usual implication that 'different' meant 'wrong'. Brendon longed to say he didn't hang out with any people - they wouldn't hang out with him - but on balance,that would only make him look more like a loser. He let them think he might be turning away from Jesus. Jesus didn't care about the colour of his shirts - or if he was getting beaten to a pulp for no particular reason, apparently.

"Do you need some ice?" asked Mrs Urie.

Brendon didn't answer for a minute. He was busy prodding his nose, deciding if it was just swollen or if they'd actually broken it this time. He'd read somewhere that if you broke a bone, you'd know it. All he knew right now was that it hurt like hell.

"Yeah," he said, then, belatedly, "thanks, Mom."

Mrs Urie sighed again. She was a champion sigher. Her personal interpretation of God's ordained method of raising children included never raising her voice towards them. Brendon often wished she would just scream.

Brendon sniffed. A drop of blood fell on the place setting with its ugly decorative roses. Brendon rubbed his hand under his nose and got a smear of red for his troubles. He didn't dare mop it up with a dish-cloth, icy-white and pristine as they were. He settled for wiping the blot with his finger and sucking it clean. It tasted sharp and sour. Familiar.

"Tip your head forward," Mrs Urie ordered. Brendon hissed as the ice-pack chilled the back of his neck. "Are you pinching your nose?"

"Yeth," said Brendon.

"Good," said Mrs Urie. As blasé as if they'd done this a hundred times (close enough); as concerned as if it were the first (not by a long shot). "I just finished making soup; do you want some?"

"Won't it ruin my dinner?"

"No," said Mrs Urie. "I'll put it back an hour."

Although Brendon's brothers and sisters often dropped in, meals were no longer the tactical manoeuvre they once had been. Mrs Urie could afford to play fast and loose with schedules these days, now there was only Brendon to worry about - Brendon who never had friends to visit or after-school activities to attend.

By the time the soup was hot and the toast ready, Brendon's nose had stopped bleeding. The sickly taste of blood coated his tongue, and he hastily gulped down half a glass of milk to wash it away. His mother sat down opposite him with a soup-bowl of her own. That was never a good sign; Mrs Urie believed food smoothed over any rough patches she felt herself required to create. There'd been cupcakes, trays and trays of them, on the day she told his sister she couldn't marry a Roman Catholic.

Mrs Urie didn't go straight for the kill. She made small talk about the meal - "Hot enough?" "Do you want more toast?" - and the weather, which was sunny. It rarely wasn't. She waited until Brendon's soup was half-drunk before she said, off-hand, "So, what happened this time?"