Heart of the Storm (Part 13)
Title: Heart of the Storm
Authors: lizynob and lorafantastory
Pairings: Oscar/Block as the Anna/Hans dynamic
Characters: Oscar Schlumper, Wayne Schlumper, Dr. Block, Dr. Tease, minor mentions of Party Mania characters
Word Count: 47,002
Warnings: Descriptions of anxiety, some bullying, angst, references to death
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Epilogue, Bonus Content
I Get The Feeling You Don’t Know
The day dragged on into evening, then back into night. Wayne nodded off into a light doze several times, only to force himself awake after only fifteen minutes or so. Oscar had been there for him for so long, and it was his turn to be there for his brother. He was not going to leave Oscar alone.
Wayne didn’t know how long Oscar would be asleep, or when he should become worried if Oscar hadn’t woken up. Occasionally, Oscar’s expression would become pained and Wayne would press a cautious touch over his heart just long enough to be sure that it was still beating correctly. Soon it became a ritual Wayne did every hour or so whether he really needed to or not.
The long, quiet span of darkness passed and another dawn broke. Wayne continued to sustain himself on brief intervals of sleep and constant reassurance that his younger brother’s heart was still functioning properly. The new day dragged on as slow as the previous one but at some point during the late morning, Oscar began to stir at last. His movements were small at first, little more than a slight moan and shift of his head as his consciousness gradually surfaced from the void that had previously overtaken it.
Awareness was slow to return but eventually Oscar’s eyes wearily blinked open. He squinted in confusion as the world around him sluggishly returned into some sort of focus, not sure where he was at, his last waking memories a disoriented blur. A small instinctive attempt was made to sit up, an attempt that quickly proved to be unwise when a wave of pain and dizziness overcame him, and he sank back down into what he faintly realized where pillows.
Wayne had been slightly zoned out for the past several hours, but straightened in his chair at once when his brother started moving. “Oscar?” He positioned himself more directly in Oscar’s line of sight, trying to help the glassy, disoriented eyes see him better. “Careful.” He reached out instinctively to push his brother back down as he tried to sit up, but stopped himself before his ungloved hand could get too close. “Don’t try too much just yet. You...your body’s been through a lot.”
“Wayne?” Oscar questioned groggily as he realized his brother was with him. His limbs felt heavy but he managed to bring a hand to his face and rub his eyes slightly.
He was in his room he realized. The pillows and bed were his own and he was simply laying in his room. Confusion flared up as his surroundings clashed with the chaotic bits and pieces of memories that lingered within his mind. His thoughts were scattered and nothing added up. He was in his room, but so was Wayne; and that didn’t make any sense because Wayne never came into his room. But then again, nothing his mind was telling him made any sense because he also vaguely remembered lightning coming from Wayne’s hands, beautiful but dangerous scientists, walking through a wooded area, and all sorts of other strange events. It was as though he’d had a particularly long dream that seemed far too real to be a dream. But if it hadn’t been a dream, then why was he in bed waking up from it?
“What…” Oscar struggled to speak coherently, unsure what to even ask. “Why are you in my room? What happened?”
Wayne blew out a long breath as Oscar stared up at him. Wasn’t that a loaded question? Where could he even start? Hell, he wasn’t even sure on a lot of points.
“I...I don’t know how much you remember,” he began quietly. “The last time something like this happened, you didn’t remember a moment of it. But...well....” His fingers began to tingle at the memory and he held them up so Oscar could see, not bothering to suppress the sparks that escaped. “That, for one thing. I’ve...never lost control of it so completely in a public place before. I panicked, I...I knew I had to keep you away from me to keep from hurting you.” He swallowed. “Again. But you followed me, like you always have when I try to shut you out. And I hit you.” The sparks crawled farther up his arms, static messing with the edges of his hair, and he moved his chair back from the bed just a bit. “I never meant to. It was an accident. But it disrupted the rhythm of your heart, not to mention put a pretty awful burn on you, and you...Oscar, you could have tried to save your own life and instead you gave everything to save mine, why did you do that, I can’t…”
He stopped the words tumbling out of his mouth with a good deal of difficulty. Not yet. Oscar had only just woken up.
“You died, Oscar. Your heart stopped beating - you were clinically dead.” Wayne looked back down at his glowing hands. “I brought you back here. Apparently I can be a human defibrillator. Add that to the increasingly-ridiculous list of things I shouldn’t be able to do.” Was that everything? “Ah, and your girlfriend shot at me. That happened too.”
He glanced back up at the utterly bewildered expression on Oscar’s face. “I’m sorry, that’s a lot to pile on you at once. But, well, a lot happened.”
Oscar could only stare numbly at Wayne for a long while as he tried to follow everything his brother told him.
“So that… that was all real?” Oscar said, watching the sparks coming off of Wayne’s skin even as he asked. “That was all real.” Wayne’s words spurred Oscar’s recollection and the partial fragments of his memories began to come together into something cohesive. The result of which caused his whole body to seize up, and subsequently caused a jolt of pain that started on his chest and spread along his left shoulder and down his arm.
Oscar winced, but not solely from the physical sensation. “You… I… I didn’t mean…”
He didn’t quite remember everything but he remembered enough. Remembered that so much was all his fault.
“I’m sorry. I just… I’m sorry.”
Wayne started in disbelief. “You’re sorry? For what, for dying?” He paused, though, as he remembered trying to force himself into anger back up on the ridge. “For taking my glove, you mean?” He turned his gaze down to his right hand, the one he had burned the conference hall carpet with. “That didn’t go well, did it? But you didn’t know what would happen. I don’t suppose I can blame you much for doing that.”
“I mean for being so stupid I led a pair of crazy scientists straight to you,” Oscar corrected. “Taking your glove was my fault too though. This… this was all pretty much my fault.”
The more he thought of it, the more details came back to him, the more Oscar knew that was true. He half wanted to hide his face away in the pillows out of shame.
“Block...” his stomach tightened up over just saying her name, “She wasn’t my girlfriend. I thought she was. I wanted her to be. And she wanted me to want her to be. But it was all just a lie.” Oscar lowered his head. “She went to the conference knowing exactly who we were...and what she wanted to get, which was our patents. That’s all this was. That’s… that all I was. Just a means to an end. Just someone she had to put up with long enough to steal our work at the first opportunity. And I was all too willing to believe her. God, even she couldn’t believe how desperate I was and she was the one counting on it. Even if I had never touched your glove, I still would have ruined your life. Who knows what she would have done with our research.”
Oscar looked over at Wayne with guilt-stricken eyes. “I was the one who led them to you, who let them see what you could do. I gave her everything she wanted to know until I literally outlived my usefulness. None of this would have happened if I wasn’t such an idiot who actually believed I found someone who loved me.”
Wayne gritted his teeth as Oscar spoke, his hands clenching tighter and tighter with each word. Lightning crackled out across his shoulders and he shot to his feet, sending the chair flying. Oscar flinched away from him, eyes wide with startled horror, and Wayne had to step back to keep any stray bolts from making it to the bed. He hissed a string of profanities under his breath as he stalked to the other side of the room.
“Wayne, I’m-”
“I’m not angry at you!” he snapped. “I’m angry at her for playing with my little brother’s heart like it was a toy!” The air around his curled fingers cracked and popped with heat as he paced, but it was an emotion he could direct. He let the lightning wash over his skin, wrapping it around himself rather than allowing it to arc out to anything else nearby. “She planned to use you the whole time? She deliberately led you to believe she- I could rip her head off!” He slammed a foot into the floor hard enough to rattle the pencils on the desk.
Wayne turned back to the bed and to the guilty, miserable look on his brother’s face as the electricity surge ebbed. That was not acceptable. That expression had no right to be there. He paced back over and knelt by the pillows, reaching automatically for Oscar’s shoulder. Fortunately he caught himself before his still-sparking hand could make contact and settled for grabbing the wooden nightstand instead. “Don’t you dare be sorry for falling in love. I saw the way you looked at her at the conference, like she was the most wonderful thing since the invention of the printing press. If she lied about loving you back that’s no fault of yours.”
His voice softened. “And don’t you dare think it’s stupid that someone would love you. You’re kind and you’re brilliant and I’m afraid I haven’t told you that as much as I should. And if she can’t see how amazing you are, she sure as hell doesn’t deserve you. I’ll forgive you for any rash decisions, but don’t be sorry for anything she did.”
Oscar’s mouth opened and then closed without him saying a word. Of all the reactions he might have expected out of his brother, that one hadn’t even been on the radar. Wayne had never expressed much affection in all the years Oscar could remember, their shared grief over their parents’ death notwithstanding. And suddenly his brother was furious on his behalf. The same brother who had communicated with him purely through science and small talk for years.
“Thank you, Wayne,” he said. He was aware that his voice sounded more surprised than grateful, but hearing Wayne verbally stick up for him like that was...odd. Not unwelcome by any means, but still odd.. “That… means a lot to hear.”
“I don’t tell you that nearly enough,” Wayne replied quietly. “And for that I’m sorry.”
Silence hung in the air for a few moments as neither brother could come up with a suitable response to that fact. Wayne was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the way Oscar was staring at him, like an equation he couldn’t quite figure out.
At last he broke eye contact and cleared his throat, trying to break up some of the awkwardness that had descended on the room. “L-like I said before, your body’s been through a lot. I...should probably be letting you rest. Or, um, are you hungry? I should think so; you’ve been out for over a day. Actually, you ought to eat something whether you’re hungry or not, so I’ll just…” He gestured lamely to the door. “I’ll be right back.” He stood and backed out of the room before Oscar could answer, not even noticing the palm-shaped scorch mark he’d left on the edge of the nightstand.
Oscar watched Wayne awkwardly scurry off out of sight, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
Letting out a deep breath, he let his head roll back flat against the pillows so that he was staring up at the ceiling.
He was home, and Wayne was home too. It almost seemed too surreal. After all he had tried to fight to get Wayne to listen to him, after all of the fuss, after Wayne had literally thrown him out the door, and after all the craziness that had followed, the two were back at home like normal. Just like that.
Well, maybe not quite like normal.
Oscar slowly shifted his arm and rested a hand over his heart. It still hurt, but nothing like before. He felt a padding under his shirt and slid his hand underneath his pajama top to feel bandages wrapping around his chest and left shoulder where all of the pain was concentrated. His brother had mentioned that he’d been burned and it definitely felt like it. Most of the pain was on the surface of his skin as opposed to before when it had all been internal and so agonizing that he could scarcely even breathe. At that thought, Wayne’s words finally began to sink in, and Oscar was left with a jarring thought rattling around in his head.
He had died.
That… That was going to take a bit of time to fully process.
The other day he truly had thought that nothing much would change after coming home, that nothing would really be different save for the fact that when another fuse blew on Wayne’s side of the lab, he would know the problem wasn’t actually a faulty electrical wiring that Wayne never got around to repairing the way his brother would previously claim.
He realized now that obviously the changes were going to be a bit more substantial than that.
Oscar took a deep breath. It would be okay though. He still believed that. From the minute that Wayne had run off in fear, Oscar had immediately known he had to go find him and let him know that everything could be okay. It had been his mantra the whole way through, that everything could be okay. He admittedly wasn’t sure exactly how it would all be okay, but he refused to let himself believe the alternative. Things weren’t okay yet, but they would be. Eventually.
*****
Wayne sank into the closest chair the moment he entered the kitchen. There was so much that had happened in the last day and a half. So much that he wanted to figure out, wanted to hold close, wanted to never think of again. The dregs of adrenaline from his angry outburst were still coursing through him and mixing with hunger, an appalling lack of sleep, and all kinds of emotions that demanded to be sorted out. He shoved the emotions back as best he could.
Coffee, he decided. Coffee first, emotions later.
He tried to fall back into the strange autopilot as he set the coffee maker and began to search out something for the two of them to eat. God, did he try. But it seemed beyond his reach now and the back of his mind wondered if he’d been in some form of shock. Did shock do that?
Oscar had looked so dumbstruck when Wayne had told him he was brilliant. Was a sincere compliment from his brother really so foreign an idea? Wayne’s stomach tightened. Was constantly being shut out part of the reason Oscar thought it stupid that someone would fall in love with him?
His hands prickled yet again and sparks spiraled down around his fingers at the idea. He had spent so many years keeping his distance to protect Oscar but perhaps the distance had done more harm than he’d thought. He’d always been aware that there was a price for blocking his brother out, but what if he’d misjudged just how steep the price really was? How many other little damages had he been inflicting this whole time to keep Oscar safe?
But Oscar hadn’t been safe. Not really. In the end, Wayne had still hurt him.
The can opener and container of tuna he’d been holding clattered to the countertop as the reality of it finally hit him like a punch to the gut. For twenty years, his greatest fear was that if Oscar got too close, he would end up dead.
And he had.
Wayne slowly sank to his knees as the sparks rose up to engulf him. Oscar had died. Because of him. The one possibility that had terrified him for so much of his life had become real. The lightning had gotten out of control and there was nothing he could do to stop it and it had killed his little brother...
And then it had saved him.
That single fact worked its way into his mind and stayed there. The lightning had caused Oscar’s heart to stop, but it had restarted it again too.
Wayne struggled to work out how to feel about that, not bothering to fight the equally-confused electricity that bubbled up from inside of him. A lucky shot? Maybe. A permanent solution? Absolutely not and he wouldn’t trust it to work again, especially not on a heart that had already been through the trauma once.
A second chance to mend things with his brother?
Oscar was alive, he realized faintly. Yes, they’d been talking for the past half hour but after all of the fear and the fighting and the danger, Oscar was alive.
He pulled himself back up and leaned heavily on the counter as the sparks eased back to just his hands. What did he do now? What could he do? He couldn’t risk repeating the hell he’d put the both of them through. But after all that had happened, he couldn’t bring himself to shut his brother out again.
The smell of coffee pulled him back to the present somewhat.
Food. What he could do at the moment was food. He could work out the rest in a little while, but for now the one clear action he could take was to care for Oscar and get some basic fuel in himself.
Authors: lizynob and lorafantastory
Pairings: Oscar/Block as the Anna/Hans dynamic
Characters: Oscar Schlumper, Wayne Schlumper, Dr. Block, Dr. Tease, minor mentions of Party Mania characters
Word Count: 47,002
Warnings: Descriptions of anxiety, some bullying, angst, references to death
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Epilogue, Bonus Content
I Get The Feeling You Don’t Know
The day dragged on into evening, then back into night. Wayne nodded off into a light doze several times, only to force himself awake after only fifteen minutes or so. Oscar had been there for him for so long, and it was his turn to be there for his brother. He was not going to leave Oscar alone.
Wayne didn’t know how long Oscar would be asleep, or when he should become worried if Oscar hadn’t woken up. Occasionally, Oscar’s expression would become pained and Wayne would press a cautious touch over his heart just long enough to be sure that it was still beating correctly. Soon it became a ritual Wayne did every hour or so whether he really needed to or not.
The long, quiet span of darkness passed and another dawn broke. Wayne continued to sustain himself on brief intervals of sleep and constant reassurance that his younger brother’s heart was still functioning properly. The new day dragged on as slow as the previous one but at some point during the late morning, Oscar began to stir at last. His movements were small at first, little more than a slight moan and shift of his head as his consciousness gradually surfaced from the void that had previously overtaken it.
Awareness was slow to return but eventually Oscar’s eyes wearily blinked open. He squinted in confusion as the world around him sluggishly returned into some sort of focus, not sure where he was at, his last waking memories a disoriented blur. A small instinctive attempt was made to sit up, an attempt that quickly proved to be unwise when a wave of pain and dizziness overcame him, and he sank back down into what he faintly realized where pillows.
Wayne had been slightly zoned out for the past several hours, but straightened in his chair at once when his brother started moving. “Oscar?” He positioned himself more directly in Oscar’s line of sight, trying to help the glassy, disoriented eyes see him better. “Careful.” He reached out instinctively to push his brother back down as he tried to sit up, but stopped himself before his ungloved hand could get too close. “Don’t try too much just yet. You...your body’s been through a lot.”
“Wayne?” Oscar questioned groggily as he realized his brother was with him. His limbs felt heavy but he managed to bring a hand to his face and rub his eyes slightly.
He was in his room he realized. The pillows and bed were his own and he was simply laying in his room. Confusion flared up as his surroundings clashed with the chaotic bits and pieces of memories that lingered within his mind. His thoughts were scattered and nothing added up. He was in his room, but so was Wayne; and that didn’t make any sense because Wayne never came into his room. But then again, nothing his mind was telling him made any sense because he also vaguely remembered lightning coming from Wayne’s hands, beautiful but dangerous scientists, walking through a wooded area, and all sorts of other strange events. It was as though he’d had a particularly long dream that seemed far too real to be a dream. But if it hadn’t been a dream, then why was he in bed waking up from it?
“What…” Oscar struggled to speak coherently, unsure what to even ask. “Why are you in my room? What happened?”
Wayne blew out a long breath as Oscar stared up at him. Wasn’t that a loaded question? Where could he even start? Hell, he wasn’t even sure on a lot of points.
“I...I don’t know how much you remember,” he began quietly. “The last time something like this happened, you didn’t remember a moment of it. But...well....” His fingers began to tingle at the memory and he held them up so Oscar could see, not bothering to suppress the sparks that escaped. “That, for one thing. I’ve...never lost control of it so completely in a public place before. I panicked, I...I knew I had to keep you away from me to keep from hurting you.” He swallowed. “Again. But you followed me, like you always have when I try to shut you out. And I hit you.” The sparks crawled farther up his arms, static messing with the edges of his hair, and he moved his chair back from the bed just a bit. “I never meant to. It was an accident. But it disrupted the rhythm of your heart, not to mention put a pretty awful burn on you, and you...Oscar, you could have tried to save your own life and instead you gave everything to save mine, why did you do that, I can’t…”
He stopped the words tumbling out of his mouth with a good deal of difficulty. Not yet. Oscar had only just woken up.
“You died, Oscar. Your heart stopped beating - you were clinically dead.” Wayne looked back down at his glowing hands. “I brought you back here. Apparently I can be a human defibrillator. Add that to the increasingly-ridiculous list of things I shouldn’t be able to do.” Was that everything? “Ah, and your girlfriend shot at me. That happened too.”
He glanced back up at the utterly bewildered expression on Oscar’s face. “I’m sorry, that’s a lot to pile on you at once. But, well, a lot happened.”
Oscar could only stare numbly at Wayne for a long while as he tried to follow everything his brother told him.
“So that… that was all real?” Oscar said, watching the sparks coming off of Wayne’s skin even as he asked. “That was all real.” Wayne’s words spurred Oscar’s recollection and the partial fragments of his memories began to come together into something cohesive. The result of which caused his whole body to seize up, and subsequently caused a jolt of pain that started on his chest and spread along his left shoulder and down his arm.
Oscar winced, but not solely from the physical sensation. “You… I… I didn’t mean…”
He didn’t quite remember everything but he remembered enough. Remembered that so much was all his fault.
“I’m sorry. I just… I’m sorry.”
Wayne started in disbelief. “You’re sorry? For what, for dying?” He paused, though, as he remembered trying to force himself into anger back up on the ridge. “For taking my glove, you mean?” He turned his gaze down to his right hand, the one he had burned the conference hall carpet with. “That didn’t go well, did it? But you didn’t know what would happen. I don’t suppose I can blame you much for doing that.”
“I mean for being so stupid I led a pair of crazy scientists straight to you,” Oscar corrected. “Taking your glove was my fault too though. This… this was all pretty much my fault.”
The more he thought of it, the more details came back to him, the more Oscar knew that was true. He half wanted to hide his face away in the pillows out of shame.
“Block...” his stomach tightened up over just saying her name, “She wasn’t my girlfriend. I thought she was. I wanted her to be. And she wanted me to want her to be. But it was all just a lie.” Oscar lowered his head. “She went to the conference knowing exactly who we were...and what she wanted to get, which was our patents. That’s all this was. That’s… that all I was. Just a means to an end. Just someone she had to put up with long enough to steal our work at the first opportunity. And I was all too willing to believe her. God, even she couldn’t believe how desperate I was and she was the one counting on it. Even if I had never touched your glove, I still would have ruined your life. Who knows what she would have done with our research.”
Oscar looked over at Wayne with guilt-stricken eyes. “I was the one who led them to you, who let them see what you could do. I gave her everything she wanted to know until I literally outlived my usefulness. None of this would have happened if I wasn’t such an idiot who actually believed I found someone who loved me.”
Wayne gritted his teeth as Oscar spoke, his hands clenching tighter and tighter with each word. Lightning crackled out across his shoulders and he shot to his feet, sending the chair flying. Oscar flinched away from him, eyes wide with startled horror, and Wayne had to step back to keep any stray bolts from making it to the bed. He hissed a string of profanities under his breath as he stalked to the other side of the room.
“Wayne, I’m-”
“I’m not angry at you!” he snapped. “I’m angry at her for playing with my little brother’s heart like it was a toy!” The air around his curled fingers cracked and popped with heat as he paced, but it was an emotion he could direct. He let the lightning wash over his skin, wrapping it around himself rather than allowing it to arc out to anything else nearby. “She planned to use you the whole time? She deliberately led you to believe she- I could rip her head off!” He slammed a foot into the floor hard enough to rattle the pencils on the desk.
Wayne turned back to the bed and to the guilty, miserable look on his brother’s face as the electricity surge ebbed. That was not acceptable. That expression had no right to be there. He paced back over and knelt by the pillows, reaching automatically for Oscar’s shoulder. Fortunately he caught himself before his still-sparking hand could make contact and settled for grabbing the wooden nightstand instead. “Don’t you dare be sorry for falling in love. I saw the way you looked at her at the conference, like she was the most wonderful thing since the invention of the printing press. If she lied about loving you back that’s no fault of yours.”
His voice softened. “And don’t you dare think it’s stupid that someone would love you. You’re kind and you’re brilliant and I’m afraid I haven’t told you that as much as I should. And if she can’t see how amazing you are, she sure as hell doesn’t deserve you. I’ll forgive you for any rash decisions, but don’t be sorry for anything she did.”
Oscar’s mouth opened and then closed without him saying a word. Of all the reactions he might have expected out of his brother, that one hadn’t even been on the radar. Wayne had never expressed much affection in all the years Oscar could remember, their shared grief over their parents’ death notwithstanding. And suddenly his brother was furious on his behalf. The same brother who had communicated with him purely through science and small talk for years.
“Thank you, Wayne,” he said. He was aware that his voice sounded more surprised than grateful, but hearing Wayne verbally stick up for him like that was...odd. Not unwelcome by any means, but still odd.. “That… means a lot to hear.”
“I don’t tell you that nearly enough,” Wayne replied quietly. “And for that I’m sorry.”
Silence hung in the air for a few moments as neither brother could come up with a suitable response to that fact. Wayne was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the way Oscar was staring at him, like an equation he couldn’t quite figure out.
At last he broke eye contact and cleared his throat, trying to break up some of the awkwardness that had descended on the room. “L-like I said before, your body’s been through a lot. I...should probably be letting you rest. Or, um, are you hungry? I should think so; you’ve been out for over a day. Actually, you ought to eat something whether you’re hungry or not, so I’ll just…” He gestured lamely to the door. “I’ll be right back.” He stood and backed out of the room before Oscar could answer, not even noticing the palm-shaped scorch mark he’d left on the edge of the nightstand.
Oscar watched Wayne awkwardly scurry off out of sight, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
Letting out a deep breath, he let his head roll back flat against the pillows so that he was staring up at the ceiling.
He was home, and Wayne was home too. It almost seemed too surreal. After all he had tried to fight to get Wayne to listen to him, after all of the fuss, after Wayne had literally thrown him out the door, and after all the craziness that had followed, the two were back at home like normal. Just like that.
Well, maybe not quite like normal.
Oscar slowly shifted his arm and rested a hand over his heart. It still hurt, but nothing like before. He felt a padding under his shirt and slid his hand underneath his pajama top to feel bandages wrapping around his chest and left shoulder where all of the pain was concentrated. His brother had mentioned that he’d been burned and it definitely felt like it. Most of the pain was on the surface of his skin as opposed to before when it had all been internal and so agonizing that he could scarcely even breathe. At that thought, Wayne’s words finally began to sink in, and Oscar was left with a jarring thought rattling around in his head.
He had died.
That… That was going to take a bit of time to fully process.
The other day he truly had thought that nothing much would change after coming home, that nothing would really be different save for the fact that when another fuse blew on Wayne’s side of the lab, he would know the problem wasn’t actually a faulty electrical wiring that Wayne never got around to repairing the way his brother would previously claim.
He realized now that obviously the changes were going to be a bit more substantial than that.
Oscar took a deep breath. It would be okay though. He still believed that. From the minute that Wayne had run off in fear, Oscar had immediately known he had to go find him and let him know that everything could be okay. It had been his mantra the whole way through, that everything could be okay. He admittedly wasn’t sure exactly how it would all be okay, but he refused to let himself believe the alternative. Things weren’t okay yet, but they would be. Eventually.
*****
Wayne sank into the closest chair the moment he entered the kitchen. There was so much that had happened in the last day and a half. So much that he wanted to figure out, wanted to hold close, wanted to never think of again. The dregs of adrenaline from his angry outburst were still coursing through him and mixing with hunger, an appalling lack of sleep, and all kinds of emotions that demanded to be sorted out. He shoved the emotions back as best he could.
Coffee, he decided. Coffee first, emotions later.
He tried to fall back into the strange autopilot as he set the coffee maker and began to search out something for the two of them to eat. God, did he try. But it seemed beyond his reach now and the back of his mind wondered if he’d been in some form of shock. Did shock do that?
Oscar had looked so dumbstruck when Wayne had told him he was brilliant. Was a sincere compliment from his brother really so foreign an idea? Wayne’s stomach tightened. Was constantly being shut out part of the reason Oscar thought it stupid that someone would fall in love with him?
His hands prickled yet again and sparks spiraled down around his fingers at the idea. He had spent so many years keeping his distance to protect Oscar but perhaps the distance had done more harm than he’d thought. He’d always been aware that there was a price for blocking his brother out, but what if he’d misjudged just how steep the price really was? How many other little damages had he been inflicting this whole time to keep Oscar safe?
But Oscar hadn’t been safe. Not really. In the end, Wayne had still hurt him.
The can opener and container of tuna he’d been holding clattered to the countertop as the reality of it finally hit him like a punch to the gut. For twenty years, his greatest fear was that if Oscar got too close, he would end up dead.
And he had.
Wayne slowly sank to his knees as the sparks rose up to engulf him. Oscar had died. Because of him. The one possibility that had terrified him for so much of his life had become real. The lightning had gotten out of control and there was nothing he could do to stop it and it had killed his little brother...
And then it had saved him.
That single fact worked its way into his mind and stayed there. The lightning had caused Oscar’s heart to stop, but it had restarted it again too.
Wayne struggled to work out how to feel about that, not bothering to fight the equally-confused electricity that bubbled up from inside of him. A lucky shot? Maybe. A permanent solution? Absolutely not and he wouldn’t trust it to work again, especially not on a heart that had already been through the trauma once.
A second chance to mend things with his brother?
Oscar was alive, he realized faintly. Yes, they’d been talking for the past half hour but after all of the fear and the fighting and the danger, Oscar was alive.
He pulled himself back up and leaned heavily on the counter as the sparks eased back to just his hands. What did he do now? What could he do? He couldn’t risk repeating the hell he’d put the both of them through. But after all that had happened, he couldn’t bring himself to shut his brother out again.
The smell of coffee pulled him back to the present somewhat.
Food. What he could do at the moment was food. He could work out the rest in a little while, but for now the one clear action he could take was to care for Oscar and get some basic fuel in himself.