fic: Lyle in Real Life
Title: Lyle in Real Life.
Rating: PG-13.
Pairings/Characters: Lyle; Claire/Gretchen, Sandra/Doug, Sandra/Noah.
Word count: 8,500~
Disclaimer: I don't even own a car, I definitely don't own this.
Summary: Lyle has spent much of his adult life writing books about Claire's life. They're pretty popular. Only problem? Claire doesn't know about them, and now Lyle has to go home for Christmas... AU after 4x18.
A/N: THE FIC THAT WOULD NOT END. Written for pippin004 for heroes-exchange
Clara Brown was fourteen for one last night. Her parents had suggested that she go to bed early, her mother all smiles and her dad hiding his face behind a newspaper. Clara dressed in puppy dog flannel pyjamas and lay in bed, listening to their soft, bickering voices, and their footsteps that thumped all around downstairs.
She already knew what they'd got her, of course. She'd checked through every cupboard and hiding place in the house until she found the perfectly pressed new band uniform hanging behind her dad's suits in her parents' closet. She went to sleep dreaming about the red and gold detailing.
Little could she know that in less than a week, that uniform would be burned to a crisp.
Butler, Thomas. The Fire: Clara Brown, book one. New York: Galactic Publication, 2019, pp 1.
Lyle's alarm goes off at 6.30am. And then at 6.45am, and then, finally, at 7am. He gets out of bed, shuffles across the cold wood floors to the bathroom, washes, dresses, and heads downstairs to the kitchen.
He's out of milk. And bread.
At 7.45am, already fifteen minutes late, he gets into his car and drives to work. Traffic is average, bordering heavy, and there's a fine sheet of rain that doesn't require his windshield wipers. He pulls up to the school twenty minutes late, and spends five minutes looking for a parking space.
On the school steps there's a group of students valiantly trying to keep their cigarettes lit against the rain.
“Hey,” he says as he passes them. “What are you doing out here? Get inside.”
“Math test,” their leader says. “What's your excuse?”
Lyle got his undergraduate degree in English Literature from UCLA, a couple of years later than his high school friends, at twenty four. For a while, he remained at his part time job, getting promoted to assistant district manager of the Costa Verde chain of McDonalds. Eventually, he quit, imagining it in his head as a blaze of glory wherein he delivered cutting remarks to everyone who had wronged him... but really he handed his notice in, and worked there for another month before silently collecting his bag and leaving his uniform folded neatly in the backroom.
He had to go back home and live with his mom... and Doug, and listen to how well Claire was doing, and see his dad every once in a while when he blew through town. He couldn't find a job, and his lone high school girlfriend was getting married. He found out about it from her Facebook; he wasn't invited.
Lyle knew something had to change. He'd spent his whole life in the shadow of Claire and he knew he'd never achieve anything as long as he was measured against her.
So far his plan hasn't quite worked out the way he thought it would.
At eleven am, his tenth grade class shambles in, taking their sweet time finding seats, switching to be closer to their BFF or further away from the kid who smells.
“Okay, class,” he calls over their din. “how many of you actually read the assigned chapter of Wuthering Heights?”
One lonely hand is briefly raised at the back before disappearing.
“Okay.” He looks down at his class schedule. It says: 'ask them if they've read WH. Make them read it.' “Turn your books to page two hundred, and start reading. Quietly.”
Lyle is good at sitting in a room full of students ignoring him - so much so that he invigilates most exams given at the school. He finds that the best time to work on one thing is when he's meant to be working on another.
He gets his laptop out of his bag and opens it, pointedly not looking up to see Kelly pass Andrea a note under her desk. The frequency with which his students get detentions and sent to the principal's office is starting to reflect badly on him.
A fresh page of his word processor sits on his computer, mocking him with its whiteness. He types a word,
The
and stops. 'The' what? He has no idea where this sentence is going. He stares at it, willing it to tell him where it wants to go next, but it's a word on a computer screen, and he needs to stop anthropomorphising everything. Before he knows it, the bell is ringing, and he's spent an hour playing Solitaire. He's really good at it.
“Read the last couple of chapters over the weekend,” he calls out of the door as the last few students retreat from the room.
“Oh, whatever,” he mumbles, snapping his laptop shut..
-
There's a school thing, a meeting about-- something. The school's consistently low SAT scores. Lyle's been asked to attend, even though it's a higher up thing, and he's the newest teacher at the school. He can only guess that this is a bad thing.
He tells the principal's receptionist that he's feeling unwell, and leaves for the day, stopping at a McDonald's drive-thru to get a milkshake and carton of fries.
He picks up his mail from the mail room, and dumps it immediately on the nearest surface upon entering his apartment. He toes his shoes off and sits down. The apartment looks a mess; shirts and socks draped over furniture and, if he cranes his neck, a stack of unwashed plates in the sink. He sighs and pulls out his cell.
Five new messages, it says. He dials voicemail and skims through the messages.
“Mr Burton, this is Wells Fargo calling-”
“Hi, I'm calling to follow up a conversation we had last week about double glazing-”
“Good afternoon, you have three overdue library books, please-”
“Lyle, this is... your father-”
“I'm calling in regards to-”
Lyle's finger stutters to a stop. He looks at his phone, then clicks back to the last message; he holds the handset carefully to his ear.
“Lyle, this is... your father. It's been a while. I- look, it would mean a lot to your mother if she could see you this Christmas. It's been nine years, it's time to man up. I expect to see you in Costa Verde by the 20th.”
Lyle snaps the phone closed and places it neatly on the coffee table. He stares at it, gnawing on a fingernail.
“Fuck,” he pronounces.
-
The thing is, when Lyle decided that his life was in need of a change, he wasn't so stupid as to think that his family would let him be. His father had and has a pathological need to be privy to everything that the people around him are getting up to, and his sister somehow always managed to make every situation revolve around her. His mom... she was okay, but being alternately fussed over and ignored becomes stressful over time.
When he was twenty five, he changed his surname - Butler for Burton - packed a bag, and left. He didn't tell anyone what he was doing but he left a note. He's not proud of that.
The fact is, if his dad has found his unlisted cell phone number, then he knows everything, which consequently means Claire knows everything. Which consequently means he's fucked.
“What are you going to do?” Clara asked. She pulled at her restraints, but to no avail: they were solid metal, the edges sharp.
“Killing you is pretty high on the agenda,” Eve replied. She held a knife in her hand, lazily leaning over the chair Clara was bound to. “Which I know will be difficult, but I enjoy a challenge. I have lots of exciting new ways to torture you.”
Butler, Thomas. The Enemy: Clara Brown, book two. New York: Galactic Publication, 2020, pp 58.
The day after the school breaks for the holidays, after much deliberation, Lyle packs a bag and leaves for California. Not because he wants to, exactly, but because he has no trouble believing that his dad would be prepared to kidnap him and bring him home in the trunk of his car.
His flight has two stopovers, making it all in all nine hours long. He spends this time in the company of his laptop, as he normally does, glaring at the blankness of his word processor. His agent is bugging him about the sixth book; it's been three years since The Sorority was published, which isn't necessarily unreasonable, but he set the bar pretty high by producing a book a year.
The plane lands at five in the afternoon. By six thirty Lyle's cab driver is pulling into Manzanita Avenue, trundling past dollhouse-perfect family homes. It seems bizarre to Lyle to think that he ever lived here, even if it was only for a few miserable years of high school.
He asks the driver to drop him off a couple of houses away from the family home, and stands on the sidewalk with his suitcase and a packet of cigarettes he bought at the airport. He started smoking when he was sixteen, because it was something to do. He smoked pot for a while, but that just made him extra apathetic, so he went back to nicotine. He hasn't smoked in a few years, but shit, in this town he wants to. His mom would probably smell it on him, though.
He puts the pack away.
It's unreasonably hot in California - or maybe he's just used to the snow in Boston, now - so he sheds his sweater and slips on a pair of sunglasses before dragging his suitcase up to the house.
There are three cars in the drive, plastic reindeers on the grass, and fake snow stapled to the eves of the house. He has only a moment to drink it in before the front door slams open in spectacular fashion.
“You goddamn little bastard!” Claire screams, striding up to him and hitting him thoroughly about the head with what appears to be a make-up bag. He takes it for a couple of minutes before saying,
“I like your hair.”
Claire shrieks in annoyance, long brown hair flying everywhere as she turns around and storms back into the house.
Dad watches from the door, arms crossed.
-
Mom greets him in a flurry of hugs and kisses, and not a few tears. She cups his face in her hands,
“You're so pale!” she laments. “And so skinny!”
“Yeah. I don't have a lot of time to sunbath. Or eat.” Really, he just eats badly and has a fast metabolism. He has no muscle mass to speak of though, so-- not that lucky, really.
She sends him off upstairs to unpack, promising that they will be having 'words' later. His room is as he left it nine years ago; taekwondo trophies lined up neatly on the shelf below his window, Superman quilt covering the bed, the one lone teddy bear his dad brought back for him from one of his 'conferences'; there's even a Costa Verde High School football t-shirt folded neatly on the end of the bed.
He throws his suitcase onto the bed and stands for a moment in the centre of the room.
“I'm going to kill you later,” Claire hisses, head poking around the door.
“Good talk!” Lyle yells after her. It already feels like old times.
-
Mom has a new pomeranian, several in fact, which Lyle discovers when he's accosted by six cotton balls with legs at the bottom of the stairs. It takes him a good few minutes to negotiate his way around them without any nasty accidents.
No one speaks to each other until Mom serves dinner: him, Dad, and Claire just stand awkwardly in the dining room, trying to work out how to lay the table correctly. At one point, Claire starts shouting at him, but then Mom hollers from the kitchen and Claire throws herself into a chair.
The dinner seems to be some kind of amalgamation of Thanksgiving and Christmas, with a great big turkey, cranberry sauce, dumplings, sprouts and mashed potatoes. Lyle sits across from Claire, who sits next to their dad. Mom is at the head of the table, leaving the seat at the other end of the table free.
“So,” Lyle says, “are you two--”
“No.” Mom fiddles with her napkin, trading looks with Dad. “No, we're...”
“Honey, I'm home!” A door slams shut, and Lyle cringes at the voice. Doug fucking Douglas. She's still with that fool?
Doug enters the room with a dog under each arm. He's wearing a knitted sweater that's clearly too small for him - it has a reindeer on the front. His hair is still freakishly perfect.
“Lyle, it's great to see you!” He practically bounds up to Lyle, half-dragging him into a hug. A pomeranian is thrust in Lyle's face. “Oh look, Mrs de Mimsy Porpington, it's time for din-dins!”
Claire pinches the bridge of her nose.
-
The one thing Lyle knows about Doug is that he will eat anything. Even the gross bits: gristle, fat, sprouts; Doug just likes absolutely everything and will finish whatever is put in front of him.
“So!” he says, between mouthfuls of cranberry tinged mashed potatoes, “What have you been up to all this time?”
Lyle feels vaguely nauseous. “I teach English Literature to sixteen years olds.”
Doug starts working on a particularly tough part of the turkey. “Oh, isn't that nice!”
“Not really,” Lyle says, and looks down at his plate.
“Well-” Claire puffs herself up in her seat, staring at him dead in the eye, “-I would have imagined you were a famous author who ran away to stab his family in the back.”
They maintain eye contact for several seconds; they'd do this as kids, fighting over the remote, or cookies, or toys. Claire always beat him. “Yeah. Back-stabbing doesn't pay that well, as it happens,” he says. He learned that the best way to get her back was to not respond to her antagonism.
“Well, I hope you're happy,” she shoots back, dropping a book onto the table. He picks it up and looks at the back cover. The Forgetting Man, the third book of the Clara Brown series, the summary of which states: Clara Brown's life has always been a web of lies and deceit. Now, after being hunted by The Corporation for three years, she uncovers their biggest secret of all: a man who makes memories disappear. With the help of Zeke and an unexpected ally, will she be able to defeat this new foe or will The Corporation once again be a step ahead? It completes misrepresents the plot; he argued against at the time, but his publisher said that they didn't want it to seem too 'complex'.
“You know, this is widely thought to be the best of series.”
“How nice for you.” Claire picks up her plate. “Mom, I'm going to finish this in the living room.”
“No, you're not,” Mom says, and all eyes are suddenly on her. “Sit down. Lyle, eat your sprouts. Noah, stop feeding Miss Honeydukes under the table. Doug...” She pauses, watching him wipe up the last of the cranberry sauce with a piece of turkey. She sighs in a small, strangled sort of way. “Let's just talk about something else.”
-
Lyle goes to bed early. He lies on top of his sheets in an old pair of track pants from the brief couple of months that he tried out track in high school, and a faded Battlestar Galactica t-shirt. He's thrown the Costa Verde t-shirt into the corner of the room.
Sleep doesn't come. His bed is unfamiliarly narrow, the quilt is itchy from being washed too many times, and he can feel the springs of the mattress through the duvet. He wastes of few hours surfing the internet, ostensibly looking for inspiration for his next book, but really it's mostly porn and gross-out websites.
He didn't eat much of dinner, so by one AM his stomach is growling something fierce. He creeps out of his room and down the stairs, checking around corners for Claire - can't be too paranoid, in this family.
“Lyle.” Mom stands by the kitchen table with a glass of water. Her robe is unbelievably fluffy, causing her hair to puff up with static electricity. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Yeah,” he says, and it comes out smaller than he thought it would, cracking at the end. “Um. Toaster strudel?” He sits down on one of the stools.
“Okay.” She takes a packet from the cupboard - strawberry, his favourite - and pops it in the toaster. She stares at it until it's done, then puts it on a plate, squeezes chocolate sauce on top, and hands it to him. Just how he likes it.
“Thanks,” he mumbles.
She watches him eat, doesn't even try to conceal the fact; he knows he should say something, but he doesn't know what. “Mom-”
“You really hurt a lot of people, Lyle.” She sits down across from him. “You broke my heart.”
“I know,” he whispers. “I-- it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“And your sister's fixin' to kill you.”
“Yeah,” he says, and laughs, because when hasn't she? “That seemed like a good idea at the time, too.”
“What have you been doing all this time?” She covers his hand with hers, anchoring him to the table.
“Not much,” he admits. His great adventure fell flat pretty much immediately. “I worked retail for a while, applied for an internship at a publishing house and didn't get it, almost got engaged but got dumped instead. That kind of thing.”
“Mm-hm. I wish you felt like you could come home.”
“It was never you, Mom.” In the next room, he can hear his dad snoring softly.
“That doesn't make me feel any better,” she says.
“I know.” Dad's snoring increases and Lyle shakes his head. “What is up with Dad being here?”
“I asked him to find you. He asked me to let him spend Christmas here.”
Of course she asked him, Lyle already knew that, but-- it's nice to get confirmation that that was the only reason for his father making contact.
“And Doug, how does he feel about that?”
She smiles. “You know Doug, he doesn't mind anything.” Her voice comes out a little flat. She pulls her hand away. “I'm going to go up to bed, don't stay up too late, darling.”
She kisses him on the temple as she leaves.
-
Lyle started writing on a whim. He'd taken a creative writing class in university for the easy grade, but never really seriously thought about it as anything but semi-coherent ramblings that no one would ever want to read. But then he got fired from his retail job for general lack of work ethic, and needed money. There was a short story competition in his local newspaper: the winner would win $750. He wrote about a girl, Charlene at the time, who discovered that she'd been genetically altered. He came third, and got $250, but it got him to thinking, and he started writing, idly, whenever he had some free time. He'd read somewhere that writing things down could be a sort of therapy, and it did help for awhile. He couldn't tell anyone these things, not even a psychiatrist (who he probably desperately needed), and this was the next best thing.
He sent his first manuscript out as a joke and got ten rejections before a tiny science fiction publisher decided to take it on. He set up a post office box in Manhattan and never gave them his real name. Or, his half real name, really.
He hasn't been known as Lyle Bennet for twenty years.
-
The next day, on the morning of the twenty second, he wakes up to hammering outside his window. A couple of his trophies have tipped over onto the floor. He rolls out of bed, pulls the curtain back and looks out at Doug with one foot braced against the wall, the other on a ladder, securing lights to the house. Dad is holding the ladder - or standing by it. He's reading a newspaper.
Doug waves brightly at Lyle. Lyle closes the curtain.
Downstairs, Claire is angrily whisking a bowl of something.
“Oh good, you're up!” Mom exclaims, breezing past him. “I have to go out and pick up some last minute gifts. Help your sister, you were always so good at decorating cookies.”
“Should I be worried about Doug falling off the roof?” he asks.
She slips her coat on. “No, darling, I'm sure your father will handle it.”
“That's what I'm worried about,” he replies, but she doesn't hear him.
In the kitchen, he takes a rolling pin and begins to work on the dough that Claire's already made.
“Nice shirt,” she says. She grabs a carton of milk and slops some of it into the mixing bowl.
He tips his head to one side, taking in the hot pink shorts, Disney t-shirt, and fluffy slippers. “Glass houses,” he says.
She growls and whisks, silently and furiously, for the next fifteen minutes. Lyle slides the cookies into the oven.
“Do you, like, want me to do that?” he asks, and she all but throws the bowl at him. “What's this supposed to be?”
“Pie crust,” she snaps.
Lyle lifts the whisk out of the bowl. “Why's it so... runny?”
“It was too fucking crumbly before!”
“Okay.” He picks up the bag of flour and tips it into the mix. “We'll just make three pies instead of one.”
“How do you know how to bake?” she asks angrily, hopping up onto the counter.
“There are a lot of things you don't about me, Claire.” He smiles, and begins kneading the dough with his hands.
“No shit,” she replies.
“Don't cry about it, now!” Dad's voice drifts into the house, punctuated by pathetic whimpering.
“It hurts,” Doug whines. He comes into view, cradling his hand to his chest. His t-shirt is soaked with blood.
“I know, but these things happen,” Dad says happily. Doug hobbles over to the sink, turns on the water and holds his shaking hand under it. Claire's eyes widen, and she scoots away from them.
“Now, let's look at this,” Dad says matter-of-factly. “Oh, it's not that bad.” He reaches around Doug, and a moment later his arm jerks back.
“Holy fuck,” Claire says as Doug shrieks. In his hand, Dad holds a nail.
“See, it's better now,” he says, patting Doug on the back. Doug begins to cry.
“Dad,” Claire says, “there's a hole.”
He heaves a sigh and bobs his head from side to side. “Okay! Let's go to the hospital!” He manoeuvres Doug back out of the kitchen.
Lyle is speechless for a moment. He's not used to these kinds of disasters any more; they were a dime a dozen when he was a kid, but his adult life has been pretty blood-free. “Couldn't you have injected him with your blood?”
Claire shrugs. She bites her lip and looks away, at the bloody sink, and the bloody nail. The corner of her mouth quirks up, and she begins to laugh, covering her face with her hand.
It's contagious, and soon Lyle's laughing too, arms shaking as he continues to knead the dough. He wipes his face on his arm and looks up at her, which only sets them off again.
By the time their mom gets home, Lyle's decorating the cookies (years of painting tiny figurines have given him surgeon-steady hands), and Claire's making a mess with the last half dozen or so.
“What the fuck?” he asks, gesturing to the cookies, and Claire laughs, smudging the red and green icing together.
“A Christmas tree, after too much eggnog,” she says, holding it up. He grins.
“You two are happy,” Mom says. She drops her bags on the floor. “Don't look in those.”
That breaks the spell. Claire narrows her eyes and straightens up. “I'm going to have a shower.” She flounces out of the room, her footsteps heavy on the staircase a moment later.
“The cookies look wonderful-- what... what happened here?” His mom points to the bloody nail balanced on the edge of the sink.
“Dad handled it,” Lyle says.
Nicolas read over the papers Clara handed him. She stood back with Norman, wringing her hands nervously. “You can't--” she said, and paused. “You have help us.”
“Clara, I can't,” he said, dropping the file onto his desk. “I haven't got the authority.”
“You're the president! If you can't help, then who can? And-- and you're my father. Please.”
Norman looked at her and took her hand. He was bruised to hell from the fight, should have been in a hospital, really; even Nick offered him the couch to sit down on, and her dad and her bio-dad hated each other.
“Eve says that they're not going to stop until The Forgetting Man is dead. He's helped all of us, you can't let this happen!”
Nick sat down heavily. “I guess I can kiss re-election goodbye.”
Butler, Thomas. The Forgetting Man: Clara Brown, book three. New York: Scholastic, 2021, pp 148.
Doug and Dad get back from the hospital six hours later. Doug is more loopy than usual, singing 'Jingle Bells' over and over and over again. Mom sits him down in the living room with a string of lights to untangle, which he seems to enjoy, but nevertheless continues to sing. Dad escapes out on to the deck, and after several hours of helping his mother wash and groom the dogs, Lyle joins him.
He stands next to his father in silence for a couple of minutes, eating a cookie he liberated from the kitchen.
“What did they give him at the hospital?” he asks finally.
“Morphine. He wouldn't stop crying.” Dad shrugs like: what're you gonna do?
“Yeah, these pussies who can't cope with a little nail through the hand,” Lyle replies, wiping his hands on his pants.
“Right?” Dad says. He smiles awkwardly, and the conversation ebbs away. Lyle watches the neighbour's lights twinkling.
“Lyle,” Dad says at length, “What you did was incredibly irresponsible. And dangerous, I might add. You could still get all of us into a lot of trouble.”
Lyle looks at him, just looks at him until his father breaks eye contact. “Where's Lauren?” he asks.
“Oh, she and I-- we broke up a while back. Too-- too similar, I guess.” His father won't look back at him.
Something new occurs to Lyle. “Why was Doug using nails to secure lights to the house?”
“He... wasn't. We were fixing the postbox...”
“And?” Lyle prompts.
“And my hand slipped,” he says, and Lyle can see the outline of a smile on his face.
“You're making a play for Mom, aren't you? Dad?” He reaches out and touches his dad's shoulder to draw his attention. He quickly withdraws his hand.
“You know, Doug is such an idiot that I feel stupider just for knowing him,” Dad replies. “Your mom has never married him, and I know he's asked. Your sister thinks that she misses me.”
“Of course Claire would have something to do with this.” Lyle shakes his head. Inside, his mom is calling for him. “Well. Be careful. I know you, Dad, you're always into something. If you hurt her again, I wouldn't be surprised if she killed you.”
Dad nods, once, disguised surprise in his expression. Lyle has probably never said so many consecutive words to him in his life.
By far the most unbelievable character in this story of a genetically altered underground is Parker Peters, the obvious parody of Peter Parker. Endlessly caring and heroic in the face of repeated abuse from his mother, his brother the president, and Norman Brown, the adoptive father of titular character Clara, Parker becomes increasingly irritating as the series wears on. I can believe in Clara's ability to heal from any wound, that Norman is a secret agent, that Clara is the secret biological daughter of the POTUS, but I can't believe that there's anyone in the world as optimistic as Parker.
Smith, Tim. "Clara Brown, the latest Harry Potter?" Locus Magazine April 2023: 32-34
When Lyle stumbles into the kitchen early the next morning, he spends a couple of minutes struggling with the coffee maker before he senses another presence in the room. He turns slowly, taking stock of the room around him. He learnt this much from his dad: always be aware of your surroundings. As if Lyle could just whip out his mad martial arts skills if he was attacked - it hadn't done much good against that nuclear dude that one time.
“Hi, Lyle.”
Lyle lowers the hand he had been brandishing his coffee cup defensively with. “Hey, Peter. What time is it?”
Peter glances at his watch. “Six-thirty.”
“Right.” Lyle turns back to the coffee maker and pours himself a cup. “Do you... want some coffee?”
“I'm good with this,” Peter replies, holding up a steaming Tim Hortons cup.
“Great.” Lyle takes a sip of his coffee; it's bitter and sludgy tasting. “Well. I'm going to have a shower. Unless you...?”
Peter waves him off, and Lyle nods, shuffling out of the kitchen with his dredges of the coffee maker. He pauses at the bottom of the stairs, then shakes his head and continues upstairs.
-
Lyle has no presents for anyone in the family. He hadn't really expected to be staying longer than a day or two, certainly not getting all the way to Christmas Day without being killed by someone. That seems... less likely now: there are more witnesses. He asks Mom if he can borrow her car, and she refuses.
“Sweetie, you're a terrible driver. I can take you, though,” she says.
So he gets in the car at midday, leaving Claire and Peter peeling potatoes, Doug walking the dogs, and Dad generally skulking around.
“What's up with Peter staying with us? Shouldn't he be spending it with his mom, or something?”
Mom turns right out of the avenue. “It's so sad, Angela passed away a few years back. Poor boy had no one to be with at Christmas. I gave him a key.”
“That was nice of you.”
She checks her wing mirror. “Well, I was in sudden need of a son to mother.”
Lyle smiles. “Nicely executed guilt trip.”
“Thank you.”
They chat idly for five minutes, about the food, and Doug's hand, and Christmases past that neither of them properly remember.
“Mom, are you happy?”
The car rolls to stop at a red light. She looks over at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, is this how you wanted your life to turn out? I mean-- aside the whole Claire being a mutant thing? You couldn't exactly have stopped that.”
She tuts. “Your sister isn't a mutant.” The light turns green and they move forward, slowly because the 23rd is apparently not a great day to need to go shopping.
“Mom?” he pushes.
“I honestly never thought about how my life 'should' turn out.”
“But, I mean, it just all seems so... flat. I'm not saying that you should get back with Dad, or anything, but you can do so much better than Mr de Mimsy fucking Porpington.” He flails his hands to illustrate. She purses her lips.
“Language, young man.” There's not a lot of force behind it, though; she keeps her eyes on the road.
“I just wonder why you're letting your ex-husband stay in your house, eat your food, and decorate your Christmas tree, is all.”
“I don't know, Lyle,” she says. She turns the radio on.
-
She drops him off at the mall and tells him to call when he needs a lift home. He wanders around, looking into shop windows, wondering what to get. He spots a nice vase for Mom, but Claire, Dad? What the hell do they like? And Doug and Peter, is he supposed to get shit for them too?
After a couple of frustrating circuits around the mall, he settles on scented soap for Claire, and a tie for his dad. Peter and Doug are getting cards. His last stop is the tie shop, and he's browsing through the selection, looking for the most godawful one he can find: like, will his dad be able to keep a straight face upon opening it? awful, when someone bumps into him. He shuffles over a couple steps and doesn't look up.
“Lyle? Lyle Butler?”
Lyle settles on Sponge Bob tie - it's pleasingly retro. He closes his fingers around it and looks up.
Oh, good, it's West Rosen.
“Hello,” he says, as standoffishly as he can muster. And he can muster a lot of standoffishness.
“Hey, I heard you left town, what have you been up to?” West asks, like he cares. As if he did anything but give Lyle shit when they were teenagers. It's a nice reminder of why Lyle hated high school.
“I'm a teacher,” he says, and looks away.
“Cool, cool, I work for a charity. Been volunteering in Africa for the past couple of months. Amazing experience.”
“Uh huh,” Lyle says.
“Just visiting the family, you know how it is.”
“Yep.”
“So, how's your sister?”
Lyle sighs. “Still a huge bitch.”
“I'd love to see her, maybe I'll drop around,” West says, as if he hadn't heard him speak. Lyle remembers West 'dropping around'. It mostly involved stalking.
“Yeah, I don't think so. Claire's... kind of gay now. Plus, you're in your late thirties and she still looks sixteen. It would be creepy.” He smiles tightly.
“Well, maybe I could-” West begins, and ugh, this fucking guy. He's got at least ten pounds and a couple of inches on Lyle, and fills out his expensive-looking fine knit sweater better than Lyle does his old bobbly one, but shit, doesn't this douchebag ever get the message?
“Look, West, don't flatter yourself. Claire's moved on. I suggest you do as well.” He holds up the tie. “I have to buy this now. Goodbye.”
Greta bumped her shoulder into a bucket and cursed softly, Clara immediately shushing her. Those girls... who knew what they were capable of; she'd thought that going to university would put an end to the insanity. Change her name, cut her hair, do something mind-numbingly normal like joining a sorority; she thought she'd be able to keep off the radar.
“I'm sorry I got you into this,” she whispered to Greta.
“I'm not,” Greta replied.
Butler, Thomas. The Sorority: Clara Brown, book five. New York: Scholastic, 2023, pp 65.
Somehow, between helping Mom pick up the last of the Christmas provisions and helping Dad clean the gutters (which-- he has issues with heights, like 'I'm going to vomit everywhere' issues. Dad doesn't seem to remember that.), Peter gets Lyle to play Scrabble with him.
“Nerds,” Claire says with some affection and sits on the couch with a magazine.
“Me and my brother used to play Scrabble at Christmas,” he says. “Before the internet, you know?”
“That must have been a very long time ago,” Lyle jokes. Peter hardly looks any older than Lyle remembers - which makes him wonder about Peter's power and if he could choose to be immortal like Claire: if he would choose it - but he seems older, in the way he carries himself. Not that Lyle is in any shape to judge, he's probably just as bad.
“Haha,” Peter replies flatly. He gets a triple word score with 'bayonet'. “Don't you have any traditions?”
Lyle shrugs. His expensive college education isn't helping him much with this game.
“Yeah, we do,” Claire cuts in. “Remember how dad used to make us brownies on Christmas Eve and sit up with us, because the idea of Santa Claus freaked you out?”
“I don't remember that,” he says slowly. He tries hard to, like he's tried hard before to remember events, and when and where pictures were taken, but his mind is blank. Claire's expression falters and she looks back down at her magazine.
The doorbell goes, and before Lyle can rush to open it and get away from Peter's sympathetic eyes, Mom is there, hugging their guest. “Gretchen, it's so nice to see you, I hoped you'd make it!”
Claire drops her magazine. Lyle gets up and approaches the hallway as Gretchen and Mom chat amiably.
“Hi,” he says.
Gretchen tilts her head. “I'm 'tall and awkward with hair that only accentuates that fact' am I?” she asks, and he cringes at the quote from his last book.
“Yeah, about that-”
She laughs. “Come here,” she says, and opens her arms. It's a little weird, but then she is a little weird, that's why he likes her. “It's nice to see you, you little bastard.”
Claire stands in the living room doorway throughout the exchange. She doesn't speak, which is strange for Claire: normally people think Lyle is mute because Claire does so much talking and he does so little. Or that's the way it used to be; he supposes he can't really say who Claire is now.
“Hey,” she says finally, in a soft voice.
Gretchen raises her hand in a half wave and lets the corners of her mouth turn up, but no more.
“Why don't I show you where you're staying?” Mom says to Gretchen. “I'm afraid that we're kinda a full house right now.”
“Sure, that would great, Sandra.”
First name basis, that's something. He turns back to Claire. She's hugging herself, eyes unfocused and staring at the floor. “You okay?”
She rubs her eyes and shakes her head. “I can't,” she says, walks past him to the front door and out of the house.
-
As it turns out, Gretchen really loves Christmas. Like, she helps Mom with more food preparations, wraps gifts, strings popcorn, and writes out cards to drop around to the neighbours. Lyle ducks out of most of it, hiding out in his room, reading old comic books. Dad does too, leaving in the late afternoon without telling anybody.
It's not that Lyle doesn't want to spend time with Mom, and he's aware that the only people who are making any real effort are the people who aren't even family (plus Doug, but Doug's Doug - even with a hole through the hand he's enthusiastic), but it's frustrating, being a part of this family-- the least important part.
At some point, he falls asleep on his bed, and wakes only when a door is slammed shut. Through the thin walls of his room, he can hear Gretchen's voice: 'I can't help you through this if you won't talk to me,' she's saying.
'Not tonight,' Claire says, 'please.'
Lyle puts a pillow over his head and goes back to sleep.
-
Christmas Eve is a flurry of activity; Lyle hears Mom get up at six am to clean the house in preparation for his uncles' and aunts' arrival. He gets up a little while later and feels bad enough to offer his help. She gives him the turkey to stuff. It's really gross.
In the afternoon, Mom sets the table, and then manipulates everyone into going carolling. Everyone but Claire, that is.
“I don't sing,” Lyle says.
“I didn't ask you if you sang,” Mom replies.
“I'm not coming,” Claire says.
“Okay,” Mom replies, after a long pause.
They hand out cards and cookies to the neighbours; some of the neighbours look at Lyle strangely, like they want to ask where he's been all this time. He just looks away. Dad wears a hideous Christmas sweater, only to be outdone by Doug. They start trying to each sing the loudest, but Lyle's not sure if Doug knows that's what Dad is doing, or if he just likes singing loudly.
When they get home, Claire is standing in the driveway, arms crossed, pacing.
“Lyle,” she says, snagging his arm as he passes her. “We need to talk. Get in the car.”
“What? No.” Everyone else has gone back into the house. He considers yelling for Mom, but decides that might be a touch too dramatic.
“Get in the car, Lyle,” she repeats.
“I feel like I should tell a grown-up first.”
She glares at him until he relents. “Fine,” he says, “fine.”
She drives them a familiar route, and he soon realises where they're going: Costa Verde High School. He asks her a couple of times what she's up to, but she won't respond to him, only giving him directions like, 'get in' and 'get out' and 'shut up'.
She parks around the back of the school, near the chain link fence surrounding the bleachers.
“Come on,” she says, walking up to the fence and putting her foot into one of the links.
“You can't be serious,” he says as she scales the fence. “I can't get over that.”
She rolls her eyes, produces a hairpin from her hair and works it into the lock of the gate. She pulls it open a second later and he decides not to ask where she learnt to do that.
“What are we doing here?” he asks, following her up the bleachers, climbing them like steps.
“I wanted to talk to you. Without witnesses.” She stops. “Sit.”
“I could take you, you know,” he says. He's, what, approximately double her size?
“Right.” She drops down onto the bench and looks up at him expectantly. “So,” she says.
“So,” he echoes. “Are you going to tell me what's up, because you dragged me to this fucking hellhole of a school, and I kind of want to go home and get drunk.”
She blinks, “You didn't like it here?”
He stays standing. “No, Claire, I did not.”
“Oh, I didn't know.”
“Why would you, you never paid any attention to me.” What he wants to say is: you've always been impossibly selfish, when have you ever thought about me? but she's his ride and he doesn't want to be abandoned at the school. “Which doesn't even matter any more. Can we get on with this?”
“I'm really angry at you.”
“Really, because I never would have guessed.”
She leans forward and swats him on the leg. “You violated my trust and my privacy for money. And you made me fight with Gretchen.”
“Is there anything you can't make my fault?” He feels like a teenager again, arguing with her about who drank the last of the milk and why she wasn't able to finish her homework because he was playing World of Warcraft too loud.
“She thought the books were cute, and I didn't. If you hadn't written them, we wouldn't have read them, and none of this would ever have come up. Therefore: your fault.”
“And that's the only reason? 'Cause it didn't sound like that last night.”
She narrows her eyes. “You were listening to us.”
“You were talking kind of loud. It sounded like... you had additional issues, other than my massive betrayal.”
“Well,” she says, and hunches forward some. He knows what she's doing: it's what she used to do with Dad, make herself seem small and sad to gain sympathy. It worked on him, but it's not going to work on Lyle. “I don't know.”
“Tell me.” Jesus, if it'll move things along.
“Well,” she repeats. “It's just... everyone's getting older. Even you! You've got freaking wrinkles around your eyes!”
“Hey,” he protests weakly, dropping down onto the bench a couple of inches away from her. “I'm only thirty four.”
She smiles sadly and shakes her head. “I know, but. Dad had a heart scare, did you know that? The doctor said it was stress. And it scares me, that everyone's getting older and I'm not. How long can I be with Gretchen when I look young enough to be her daughter? I hate this.”
Lyle doesn't reply; he doesn't know what to say, and it's not like he can go online and get advice. It freaks him out too, that his sister's going to live if not forever then well past his death. He tries not to think about it.
“I don't know why I'm telling you this.” She sighs.
“Sometimes it's easier to tell people you hate things you wouldn't tell the people you love.” He shrugs.
She looks up quickly. “I don't hate you. I intensely dislike you at times, but I don't hate you.”
They smile at each other until it gets awkward, then look away. “For what it's worth,” he says, “I am sorry about the whole book thing.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That was a dick move.” She pauses. “But... I like, um, I like Nick. He's a good character. I like how he hasn't died.”
“Well, he has a small but dedicated fanbase; can't let them down.”
She seems pleased by this fact. “I don't know about Zeke being a secret Corporation double agent, though. That was pretty convoluted.”
“Yeah, but I didn't want to write him out after Clara left high school.”
She nods. “So, where's Kyle or Luke, or whatever.” At his raised eyebrows, she clarifies, “You know, you're 'Clara Brown' alter-ego.”
“Oh. He was in the original draft, but he was extraneous to plot, and I didn't want Norman to seem like a bad father because I couldn't be bothered to write scenes between them.” It makes sense; the character was dead weight, may as well focus on the protagonist.
“Wow, that's really pathetic.”
“What can I say? I'm pathetic. Speaking of, I saw West yesterday. He wanted to drop round. I told him you were gay.”
“Lyle, that's not nice.” She pauses. “The pathetic thing, I mean.”
“Whatever, Claire, he was and is a douchebag.”
“Oh, he wasn't.”
“He was.” He scoots a little closer to her. “Do you want to see him? I mean, Gretchen came all this way to sort things out with you. And Clara/Greta has a lot of fans.”
“Really?” She smiles briefly, glancing down at her hands. “No, I guess I don't want to see him. I just don't want things to be so hard any more.”
He bumps her shoulder. “In this family, that is never going to happen.”
-
At five to midnight, Lyle is marking exam papers on his bed. He was supposed to do it at least a week ago, but he honestly couldn't be bothered. Mostly because the average quality of them is profoundly depressing.
There's a knock at his door, and Claire pokes her head in. “Hey, can I come in?”
“Sure.”
“What are you doing?”
He waves a paper at her. “Marking.”
She comes over to his bed and picks up an essay. “This is... really bad.”
“I know, I think I'm about to get fired.”
She smiles - he lets her think it's a joke - and sits down on the bed. “Hey, do you remember how as kids we used to sneak downstairs after Mom and Dad had gone to bed, and shake our presents?”
He nods, and there's a tiny flash of relief on her face.
“Let's go look at our presents!” She grabs his hand and drags him out of the room. She holds a finger to her lips. “Be very quiet.”
He rolls his eyes, but follows her, holding her hand like they when he was four and she was five and they were scared that Santa was still in the house. They creep down the stairs, staying low to the ground. Claire stops after a moment and peers through the banisters.
“Oh my God,” she whispers.
“What?” he asks, and she points to the living room. It's dark but for the tree that's lit up and the silhouettes in front of it. He leans forward, over Claire's shoulder, and sees it: Mom holding a sprig of mistletoe over her head, her hand resting on the back of Dad's neck. Kissing.
“Oh my God,” he echoes.
Claire looks up at him and grins.
“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” he says.
“I know!” she says, a little too loudly. Their parents break apart, and she backs up quickly, shooing Lyle up the stairs.
Here's the copy of The Lost Son I promised you, try to actually finish reading it before you flip your shit and send me angry emails. Gretchen should enjoy it, I know how she has a soft spot for Clara/Greta.
About what you said on the phone last week, I might have to take you up on the offer. Me and the principal had a... disagreement over whether I sucked or not. Washington is nice this time of year, right? I hear there are some historical landmarks there, or something? But don't tell Dad, okay? He'll only flip out and do something to piss Mom off.
Bennet, Lyle. “Untitled.” Letter to Claire Bennet. 1 Dec 2027.
Rating: PG-13.
Pairings/Characters: Lyle; Claire/Gretchen, Sandra/Doug, Sandra/Noah.
Word count: 8,500~
Disclaimer: I don't even own a car, I definitely don't own this.
Summary: Lyle has spent much of his adult life writing books about Claire's life. They're pretty popular. Only problem? Claire doesn't know about them, and now Lyle has to go home for Christmas... AU after 4x18.
A/N: THE FIC THAT WOULD NOT END. Written for pippin004 for heroes-exchange
Clara Brown was fourteen for one last night. Her parents had suggested that she go to bed early, her mother all smiles and her dad hiding his face behind a newspaper. Clara dressed in puppy dog flannel pyjamas and lay in bed, listening to their soft, bickering voices, and their footsteps that thumped all around downstairs.
She already knew what they'd got her, of course. She'd checked through every cupboard and hiding place in the house until she found the perfectly pressed new band uniform hanging behind her dad's suits in her parents' closet. She went to sleep dreaming about the red and gold detailing.
Little could she know that in less than a week, that uniform would be burned to a crisp.
Butler, Thomas. The Fire: Clara Brown, book one. New York: Galactic Publication, 2019, pp 1.
Lyle's alarm goes off at 6.30am. And then at 6.45am, and then, finally, at 7am. He gets out of bed, shuffles across the cold wood floors to the bathroom, washes, dresses, and heads downstairs to the kitchen.
He's out of milk. And bread.
At 7.45am, already fifteen minutes late, he gets into his car and drives to work. Traffic is average, bordering heavy, and there's a fine sheet of rain that doesn't require his windshield wipers. He pulls up to the school twenty minutes late, and spends five minutes looking for a parking space.
On the school steps there's a group of students valiantly trying to keep their cigarettes lit against the rain.
“Hey,” he says as he passes them. “What are you doing out here? Get inside.”
“Math test,” their leader says. “What's your excuse?”
Lyle got his undergraduate degree in English Literature from UCLA, a couple of years later than his high school friends, at twenty four. For a while, he remained at his part time job, getting promoted to assistant district manager of the Costa Verde chain of McDonalds. Eventually, he quit, imagining it in his head as a blaze of glory wherein he delivered cutting remarks to everyone who had wronged him... but really he handed his notice in, and worked there for another month before silently collecting his bag and leaving his uniform folded neatly in the backroom.
He had to go back home and live with his mom... and Doug, and listen to how well Claire was doing, and see his dad every once in a while when he blew through town. He couldn't find a job, and his lone high school girlfriend was getting married. He found out about it from her Facebook; he wasn't invited.
Lyle knew something had to change. He'd spent his whole life in the shadow of Claire and he knew he'd never achieve anything as long as he was measured against her.
So far his plan hasn't quite worked out the way he thought it would.
At eleven am, his tenth grade class shambles in, taking their sweet time finding seats, switching to be closer to their BFF or further away from the kid who smells.
“Okay, class,” he calls over their din. “how many of you actually read the assigned chapter of Wuthering Heights?”
One lonely hand is briefly raised at the back before disappearing.
“Okay.” He looks down at his class schedule. It says: 'ask them if they've read WH. Make them read it.' “Turn your books to page two hundred, and start reading. Quietly.”
Lyle is good at sitting in a room full of students ignoring him - so much so that he invigilates most exams given at the school. He finds that the best time to work on one thing is when he's meant to be working on another.
He gets his laptop out of his bag and opens it, pointedly not looking up to see Kelly pass Andrea a note under her desk. The frequency with which his students get detentions and sent to the principal's office is starting to reflect badly on him.
A fresh page of his word processor sits on his computer, mocking him with its whiteness. He types a word,
The
and stops. 'The' what? He has no idea where this sentence is going. He stares at it, willing it to tell him where it wants to go next, but it's a word on a computer screen, and he needs to stop anthropomorphising everything. Before he knows it, the bell is ringing, and he's spent an hour playing Solitaire. He's really good at it.
“Read the last couple of chapters over the weekend,” he calls out of the door as the last few students retreat from the room.
“Oh, whatever,” he mumbles, snapping his laptop shut..
-
There's a school thing, a meeting about-- something. The school's consistently low SAT scores. Lyle's been asked to attend, even though it's a higher up thing, and he's the newest teacher at the school. He can only guess that this is a bad thing.
He tells the principal's receptionist that he's feeling unwell, and leaves for the day, stopping at a McDonald's drive-thru to get a milkshake and carton of fries.
He picks up his mail from the mail room, and dumps it immediately on the nearest surface upon entering his apartment. He toes his shoes off and sits down. The apartment looks a mess; shirts and socks draped over furniture and, if he cranes his neck, a stack of unwashed plates in the sink. He sighs and pulls out his cell.
Five new messages, it says. He dials voicemail and skims through the messages.
“Mr Burton, this is Wells Fargo calling-”
“Hi, I'm calling to follow up a conversation we had last week about double glazing-”
“Good afternoon, you have three overdue library books, please-”
“Lyle, this is... your father-”
“I'm calling in regards to-”
Lyle's finger stutters to a stop. He looks at his phone, then clicks back to the last message; he holds the handset carefully to his ear.
“Lyle, this is... your father. It's been a while. I- look, it would mean a lot to your mother if she could see you this Christmas. It's been nine years, it's time to man up. I expect to see you in Costa Verde by the 20th.”
Lyle snaps the phone closed and places it neatly on the coffee table. He stares at it, gnawing on a fingernail.
“Fuck,” he pronounces.
-
The thing is, when Lyle decided that his life was in need of a change, he wasn't so stupid as to think that his family would let him be. His father had and has a pathological need to be privy to everything that the people around him are getting up to, and his sister somehow always managed to make every situation revolve around her. His mom... she was okay, but being alternately fussed over and ignored becomes stressful over time.
When he was twenty five, he changed his surname - Butler for Burton - packed a bag, and left. He didn't tell anyone what he was doing but he left a note. He's not proud of that.
The fact is, if his dad has found his unlisted cell phone number, then he knows everything, which consequently means Claire knows everything. Which consequently means he's fucked.
“What are you going to do?” Clara asked. She pulled at her restraints, but to no avail: they were solid metal, the edges sharp.
“Killing you is pretty high on the agenda,” Eve replied. She held a knife in her hand, lazily leaning over the chair Clara was bound to. “Which I know will be difficult, but I enjoy a challenge. I have lots of exciting new ways to torture you.”
Butler, Thomas. The Enemy: Clara Brown, book two. New York: Galactic Publication, 2020, pp 58.
The day after the school breaks for the holidays, after much deliberation, Lyle packs a bag and leaves for California. Not because he wants to, exactly, but because he has no trouble believing that his dad would be prepared to kidnap him and bring him home in the trunk of his car.
His flight has two stopovers, making it all in all nine hours long. He spends this time in the company of his laptop, as he normally does, glaring at the blankness of his word processor. His agent is bugging him about the sixth book; it's been three years since The Sorority was published, which isn't necessarily unreasonable, but he set the bar pretty high by producing a book a year.
The plane lands at five in the afternoon. By six thirty Lyle's cab driver is pulling into Manzanita Avenue, trundling past dollhouse-perfect family homes. It seems bizarre to Lyle to think that he ever lived here, even if it was only for a few miserable years of high school.
He asks the driver to drop him off a couple of houses away from the family home, and stands on the sidewalk with his suitcase and a packet of cigarettes he bought at the airport. He started smoking when he was sixteen, because it was something to do. He smoked pot for a while, but that just made him extra apathetic, so he went back to nicotine. He hasn't smoked in a few years, but shit, in this town he wants to. His mom would probably smell it on him, though.
He puts the pack away.
It's unreasonably hot in California - or maybe he's just used to the snow in Boston, now - so he sheds his sweater and slips on a pair of sunglasses before dragging his suitcase up to the house.
There are three cars in the drive, plastic reindeers on the grass, and fake snow stapled to the eves of the house. He has only a moment to drink it in before the front door slams open in spectacular fashion.
“You goddamn little bastard!” Claire screams, striding up to him and hitting him thoroughly about the head with what appears to be a make-up bag. He takes it for a couple of minutes before saying,
“I like your hair.”
Claire shrieks in annoyance, long brown hair flying everywhere as she turns around and storms back into the house.
Dad watches from the door, arms crossed.
-
Mom greets him in a flurry of hugs and kisses, and not a few tears. She cups his face in her hands,
“You're so pale!” she laments. “And so skinny!”
“Yeah. I don't have a lot of time to sunbath. Or eat.” Really, he just eats badly and has a fast metabolism. He has no muscle mass to speak of though, so-- not that lucky, really.
She sends him off upstairs to unpack, promising that they will be having 'words' later. His room is as he left it nine years ago; taekwondo trophies lined up neatly on the shelf below his window, Superman quilt covering the bed, the one lone teddy bear his dad brought back for him from one of his 'conferences'; there's even a Costa Verde High School football t-shirt folded neatly on the end of the bed.
He throws his suitcase onto the bed and stands for a moment in the centre of the room.
“I'm going to kill you later,” Claire hisses, head poking around the door.
“Good talk!” Lyle yells after her. It already feels like old times.
-
Mom has a new pomeranian, several in fact, which Lyle discovers when he's accosted by six cotton balls with legs at the bottom of the stairs. It takes him a good few minutes to negotiate his way around them without any nasty accidents.
No one speaks to each other until Mom serves dinner: him, Dad, and Claire just stand awkwardly in the dining room, trying to work out how to lay the table correctly. At one point, Claire starts shouting at him, but then Mom hollers from the kitchen and Claire throws herself into a chair.
The dinner seems to be some kind of amalgamation of Thanksgiving and Christmas, with a great big turkey, cranberry sauce, dumplings, sprouts and mashed potatoes. Lyle sits across from Claire, who sits next to their dad. Mom is at the head of the table, leaving the seat at the other end of the table free.
“So,” Lyle says, “are you two--”
“No.” Mom fiddles with her napkin, trading looks with Dad. “No, we're...”
“Honey, I'm home!” A door slams shut, and Lyle cringes at the voice. Doug fucking Douglas. She's still with that fool?
Doug enters the room with a dog under each arm. He's wearing a knitted sweater that's clearly too small for him - it has a reindeer on the front. His hair is still freakishly perfect.
“Lyle, it's great to see you!” He practically bounds up to Lyle, half-dragging him into a hug. A pomeranian is thrust in Lyle's face. “Oh look, Mrs de Mimsy Porpington, it's time for din-dins!”
Claire pinches the bridge of her nose.
-
The one thing Lyle knows about Doug is that he will eat anything. Even the gross bits: gristle, fat, sprouts; Doug just likes absolutely everything and will finish whatever is put in front of him.
“So!” he says, between mouthfuls of cranberry tinged mashed potatoes, “What have you been up to all this time?”
Lyle feels vaguely nauseous. “I teach English Literature to sixteen years olds.”
Doug starts working on a particularly tough part of the turkey. “Oh, isn't that nice!”
“Not really,” Lyle says, and looks down at his plate.
“Well-” Claire puffs herself up in her seat, staring at him dead in the eye, “-I would have imagined you were a famous author who ran away to stab his family in the back.”
They maintain eye contact for several seconds; they'd do this as kids, fighting over the remote, or cookies, or toys. Claire always beat him. “Yeah. Back-stabbing doesn't pay that well, as it happens,” he says. He learned that the best way to get her back was to not respond to her antagonism.
“Well, I hope you're happy,” she shoots back, dropping a book onto the table. He picks it up and looks at the back cover. The Forgetting Man, the third book of the Clara Brown series, the summary of which states: Clara Brown's life has always been a web of lies and deceit. Now, after being hunted by The Corporation for three years, she uncovers their biggest secret of all: a man who makes memories disappear. With the help of Zeke and an unexpected ally, will she be able to defeat this new foe or will The Corporation once again be a step ahead? It completes misrepresents the plot; he argued against at the time, but his publisher said that they didn't want it to seem too 'complex'.
“You know, this is widely thought to be the best of series.”
“How nice for you.” Claire picks up her plate. “Mom, I'm going to finish this in the living room.”
“No, you're not,” Mom says, and all eyes are suddenly on her. “Sit down. Lyle, eat your sprouts. Noah, stop feeding Miss Honeydukes under the table. Doug...” She pauses, watching him wipe up the last of the cranberry sauce with a piece of turkey. She sighs in a small, strangled sort of way. “Let's just talk about something else.”
-
Lyle goes to bed early. He lies on top of his sheets in an old pair of track pants from the brief couple of months that he tried out track in high school, and a faded Battlestar Galactica t-shirt. He's thrown the Costa Verde t-shirt into the corner of the room.
Sleep doesn't come. His bed is unfamiliarly narrow, the quilt is itchy from being washed too many times, and he can feel the springs of the mattress through the duvet. He wastes of few hours surfing the internet, ostensibly looking for inspiration for his next book, but really it's mostly porn and gross-out websites.
He didn't eat much of dinner, so by one AM his stomach is growling something fierce. He creeps out of his room and down the stairs, checking around corners for Claire - can't be too paranoid, in this family.
“Lyle.” Mom stands by the kitchen table with a glass of water. Her robe is unbelievably fluffy, causing her hair to puff up with static electricity. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Yeah,” he says, and it comes out smaller than he thought it would, cracking at the end. “Um. Toaster strudel?” He sits down on one of the stools.
“Okay.” She takes a packet from the cupboard - strawberry, his favourite - and pops it in the toaster. She stares at it until it's done, then puts it on a plate, squeezes chocolate sauce on top, and hands it to him. Just how he likes it.
“Thanks,” he mumbles.
She watches him eat, doesn't even try to conceal the fact; he knows he should say something, but he doesn't know what. “Mom-”
“You really hurt a lot of people, Lyle.” She sits down across from him. “You broke my heart.”
“I know,” he whispers. “I-- it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“And your sister's fixin' to kill you.”
“Yeah,” he says, and laughs, because when hasn't she? “That seemed like a good idea at the time, too.”
“What have you been doing all this time?” She covers his hand with hers, anchoring him to the table.
“Not much,” he admits. His great adventure fell flat pretty much immediately. “I worked retail for a while, applied for an internship at a publishing house and didn't get it, almost got engaged but got dumped instead. That kind of thing.”
“Mm-hm. I wish you felt like you could come home.”
“It was never you, Mom.” In the next room, he can hear his dad snoring softly.
“That doesn't make me feel any better,” she says.
“I know.” Dad's snoring increases and Lyle shakes his head. “What is up with Dad being here?”
“I asked him to find you. He asked me to let him spend Christmas here.”
Of course she asked him, Lyle already knew that, but-- it's nice to get confirmation that that was the only reason for his father making contact.
“And Doug, how does he feel about that?”
She smiles. “You know Doug, he doesn't mind anything.” Her voice comes out a little flat. She pulls her hand away. “I'm going to go up to bed, don't stay up too late, darling.”
She kisses him on the temple as she leaves.
-
Lyle started writing on a whim. He'd taken a creative writing class in university for the easy grade, but never really seriously thought about it as anything but semi-coherent ramblings that no one would ever want to read. But then he got fired from his retail job for general lack of work ethic, and needed money. There was a short story competition in his local newspaper: the winner would win $750. He wrote about a girl, Charlene at the time, who discovered that she'd been genetically altered. He came third, and got $250, but it got him to thinking, and he started writing, idly, whenever he had some free time. He'd read somewhere that writing things down could be a sort of therapy, and it did help for awhile. He couldn't tell anyone these things, not even a psychiatrist (who he probably desperately needed), and this was the next best thing.
He sent his first manuscript out as a joke and got ten rejections before a tiny science fiction publisher decided to take it on. He set up a post office box in Manhattan and never gave them his real name. Or, his half real name, really.
He hasn't been known as Lyle Bennet for twenty years.
-
The next day, on the morning of the twenty second, he wakes up to hammering outside his window. A couple of his trophies have tipped over onto the floor. He rolls out of bed, pulls the curtain back and looks out at Doug with one foot braced against the wall, the other on a ladder, securing lights to the house. Dad is holding the ladder - or standing by it. He's reading a newspaper.
Doug waves brightly at Lyle. Lyle closes the curtain.
Downstairs, Claire is angrily whisking a bowl of something.
“Oh good, you're up!” Mom exclaims, breezing past him. “I have to go out and pick up some last minute gifts. Help your sister, you were always so good at decorating cookies.”
“Should I be worried about Doug falling off the roof?” he asks.
She slips her coat on. “No, darling, I'm sure your father will handle it.”
“That's what I'm worried about,” he replies, but she doesn't hear him.
In the kitchen, he takes a rolling pin and begins to work on the dough that Claire's already made.
“Nice shirt,” she says. She grabs a carton of milk and slops some of it into the mixing bowl.
He tips his head to one side, taking in the hot pink shorts, Disney t-shirt, and fluffy slippers. “Glass houses,” he says.
She growls and whisks, silently and furiously, for the next fifteen minutes. Lyle slides the cookies into the oven.
“Do you, like, want me to do that?” he asks, and she all but throws the bowl at him. “What's this supposed to be?”
“Pie crust,” she snaps.
Lyle lifts the whisk out of the bowl. “Why's it so... runny?”
“It was too fucking crumbly before!”
“Okay.” He picks up the bag of flour and tips it into the mix. “We'll just make three pies instead of one.”
“How do you know how to bake?” she asks angrily, hopping up onto the counter.
“There are a lot of things you don't about me, Claire.” He smiles, and begins kneading the dough with his hands.
“No shit,” she replies.
“Don't cry about it, now!” Dad's voice drifts into the house, punctuated by pathetic whimpering.
“It hurts,” Doug whines. He comes into view, cradling his hand to his chest. His t-shirt is soaked with blood.
“I know, but these things happen,” Dad says happily. Doug hobbles over to the sink, turns on the water and holds his shaking hand under it. Claire's eyes widen, and she scoots away from them.
“Now, let's look at this,” Dad says matter-of-factly. “Oh, it's not that bad.” He reaches around Doug, and a moment later his arm jerks back.
“Holy fuck,” Claire says as Doug shrieks. In his hand, Dad holds a nail.
“See, it's better now,” he says, patting Doug on the back. Doug begins to cry.
“Dad,” Claire says, “there's a hole.”
He heaves a sigh and bobs his head from side to side. “Okay! Let's go to the hospital!” He manoeuvres Doug back out of the kitchen.
Lyle is speechless for a moment. He's not used to these kinds of disasters any more; they were a dime a dozen when he was a kid, but his adult life has been pretty blood-free. “Couldn't you have injected him with your blood?”
Claire shrugs. She bites her lip and looks away, at the bloody sink, and the bloody nail. The corner of her mouth quirks up, and she begins to laugh, covering her face with her hand.
It's contagious, and soon Lyle's laughing too, arms shaking as he continues to knead the dough. He wipes his face on his arm and looks up at her, which only sets them off again.
By the time their mom gets home, Lyle's decorating the cookies (years of painting tiny figurines have given him surgeon-steady hands), and Claire's making a mess with the last half dozen or so.
“What the fuck?” he asks, gesturing to the cookies, and Claire laughs, smudging the red and green icing together.
“A Christmas tree, after too much eggnog,” she says, holding it up. He grins.
“You two are happy,” Mom says. She drops her bags on the floor. “Don't look in those.”
That breaks the spell. Claire narrows her eyes and straightens up. “I'm going to have a shower.” She flounces out of the room, her footsteps heavy on the staircase a moment later.
“The cookies look wonderful-- what... what happened here?” His mom points to the bloody nail balanced on the edge of the sink.
“Dad handled it,” Lyle says.
Nicolas read over the papers Clara handed him. She stood back with Norman, wringing her hands nervously. “You can't--” she said, and paused. “You have help us.”
“Clara, I can't,” he said, dropping the file onto his desk. “I haven't got the authority.”
“You're the president! If you can't help, then who can? And-- and you're my father. Please.”
Norman looked at her and took her hand. He was bruised to hell from the fight, should have been in a hospital, really; even Nick offered him the couch to sit down on, and her dad and her bio-dad hated each other.
“Eve says that they're not going to stop until The Forgetting Man is dead. He's helped all of us, you can't let this happen!”
Nick sat down heavily. “I guess I can kiss re-election goodbye.”
Butler, Thomas. The Forgetting Man: Clara Brown, book three. New York: Scholastic, 2021, pp 148.
Doug and Dad get back from the hospital six hours later. Doug is more loopy than usual, singing 'Jingle Bells' over and over and over again. Mom sits him down in the living room with a string of lights to untangle, which he seems to enjoy, but nevertheless continues to sing. Dad escapes out on to the deck, and after several hours of helping his mother wash and groom the dogs, Lyle joins him.
He stands next to his father in silence for a couple of minutes, eating a cookie he liberated from the kitchen.
“What did they give him at the hospital?” he asks finally.
“Morphine. He wouldn't stop crying.” Dad shrugs like: what're you gonna do?
“Yeah, these pussies who can't cope with a little nail through the hand,” Lyle replies, wiping his hands on his pants.
“Right?” Dad says. He smiles awkwardly, and the conversation ebbs away. Lyle watches the neighbour's lights twinkling.
“Lyle,” Dad says at length, “What you did was incredibly irresponsible. And dangerous, I might add. You could still get all of us into a lot of trouble.”
Lyle looks at him, just looks at him until his father breaks eye contact. “Where's Lauren?” he asks.
“Oh, she and I-- we broke up a while back. Too-- too similar, I guess.” His father won't look back at him.
Something new occurs to Lyle. “Why was Doug using nails to secure lights to the house?”
“He... wasn't. We were fixing the postbox...”
“And?” Lyle prompts.
“And my hand slipped,” he says, and Lyle can see the outline of a smile on his face.
“You're making a play for Mom, aren't you? Dad?” He reaches out and touches his dad's shoulder to draw his attention. He quickly withdraws his hand.
“You know, Doug is such an idiot that I feel stupider just for knowing him,” Dad replies. “Your mom has never married him, and I know he's asked. Your sister thinks that she misses me.”
“Of course Claire would have something to do with this.” Lyle shakes his head. Inside, his mom is calling for him. “Well. Be careful. I know you, Dad, you're always into something. If you hurt her again, I wouldn't be surprised if she killed you.”
Dad nods, once, disguised surprise in his expression. Lyle has probably never said so many consecutive words to him in his life.
By far the most unbelievable character in this story of a genetically altered underground is Parker Peters, the obvious parody of Peter Parker. Endlessly caring and heroic in the face of repeated abuse from his mother, his brother the president, and Norman Brown, the adoptive father of titular character Clara, Parker becomes increasingly irritating as the series wears on. I can believe in Clara's ability to heal from any wound, that Norman is a secret agent, that Clara is the secret biological daughter of the POTUS, but I can't believe that there's anyone in the world as optimistic as Parker.
Smith, Tim. "Clara Brown, the latest Harry Potter?" Locus Magazine April 2023: 32-34
When Lyle stumbles into the kitchen early the next morning, he spends a couple of minutes struggling with the coffee maker before he senses another presence in the room. He turns slowly, taking stock of the room around him. He learnt this much from his dad: always be aware of your surroundings. As if Lyle could just whip out his mad martial arts skills if he was attacked - it hadn't done much good against that nuclear dude that one time.
“Hi, Lyle.”
Lyle lowers the hand he had been brandishing his coffee cup defensively with. “Hey, Peter. What time is it?”
Peter glances at his watch. “Six-thirty.”
“Right.” Lyle turns back to the coffee maker and pours himself a cup. “Do you... want some coffee?”
“I'm good with this,” Peter replies, holding up a steaming Tim Hortons cup.
“Great.” Lyle takes a sip of his coffee; it's bitter and sludgy tasting. “Well. I'm going to have a shower. Unless you...?”
Peter waves him off, and Lyle nods, shuffling out of the kitchen with his dredges of the coffee maker. He pauses at the bottom of the stairs, then shakes his head and continues upstairs.
-
Lyle has no presents for anyone in the family. He hadn't really expected to be staying longer than a day or two, certainly not getting all the way to Christmas Day without being killed by someone. That seems... less likely now: there are more witnesses. He asks Mom if he can borrow her car, and she refuses.
“Sweetie, you're a terrible driver. I can take you, though,” she says.
So he gets in the car at midday, leaving Claire and Peter peeling potatoes, Doug walking the dogs, and Dad generally skulking around.
“What's up with Peter staying with us? Shouldn't he be spending it with his mom, or something?”
Mom turns right out of the avenue. “It's so sad, Angela passed away a few years back. Poor boy had no one to be with at Christmas. I gave him a key.”
“That was nice of you.”
She checks her wing mirror. “Well, I was in sudden need of a son to mother.”
Lyle smiles. “Nicely executed guilt trip.”
“Thank you.”
They chat idly for five minutes, about the food, and Doug's hand, and Christmases past that neither of them properly remember.
“Mom, are you happy?”
The car rolls to stop at a red light. She looks over at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, is this how you wanted your life to turn out? I mean-- aside the whole Claire being a mutant thing? You couldn't exactly have stopped that.”
She tuts. “Your sister isn't a mutant.” The light turns green and they move forward, slowly because the 23rd is apparently not a great day to need to go shopping.
“Mom?” he pushes.
“I honestly never thought about how my life 'should' turn out.”
“But, I mean, it just all seems so... flat. I'm not saying that you should get back with Dad, or anything, but you can do so much better than Mr de Mimsy fucking Porpington.” He flails his hands to illustrate. She purses her lips.
“Language, young man.” There's not a lot of force behind it, though; she keeps her eyes on the road.
“I just wonder why you're letting your ex-husband stay in your house, eat your food, and decorate your Christmas tree, is all.”
“I don't know, Lyle,” she says. She turns the radio on.
-
She drops him off at the mall and tells him to call when he needs a lift home. He wanders around, looking into shop windows, wondering what to get. He spots a nice vase for Mom, but Claire, Dad? What the hell do they like? And Doug and Peter, is he supposed to get shit for them too?
After a couple of frustrating circuits around the mall, he settles on scented soap for Claire, and a tie for his dad. Peter and Doug are getting cards. His last stop is the tie shop, and he's browsing through the selection, looking for the most godawful one he can find: like, will his dad be able to keep a straight face upon opening it? awful, when someone bumps into him. He shuffles over a couple steps and doesn't look up.
“Lyle? Lyle Butler?”
Lyle settles on Sponge Bob tie - it's pleasingly retro. He closes his fingers around it and looks up.
Oh, good, it's West Rosen.
“Hello,” he says, as standoffishly as he can muster. And he can muster a lot of standoffishness.
“Hey, I heard you left town, what have you been up to?” West asks, like he cares. As if he did anything but give Lyle shit when they were teenagers. It's a nice reminder of why Lyle hated high school.
“I'm a teacher,” he says, and looks away.
“Cool, cool, I work for a charity. Been volunteering in Africa for the past couple of months. Amazing experience.”
“Uh huh,” Lyle says.
“Just visiting the family, you know how it is.”
“Yep.”
“So, how's your sister?”
Lyle sighs. “Still a huge bitch.”
“I'd love to see her, maybe I'll drop around,” West says, as if he hadn't heard him speak. Lyle remembers West 'dropping around'. It mostly involved stalking.
“Yeah, I don't think so. Claire's... kind of gay now. Plus, you're in your late thirties and she still looks sixteen. It would be creepy.” He smiles tightly.
“Well, maybe I could-” West begins, and ugh, this fucking guy. He's got at least ten pounds and a couple of inches on Lyle, and fills out his expensive-looking fine knit sweater better than Lyle does his old bobbly one, but shit, doesn't this douchebag ever get the message?
“Look, West, don't flatter yourself. Claire's moved on. I suggest you do as well.” He holds up the tie. “I have to buy this now. Goodbye.”
Greta bumped her shoulder into a bucket and cursed softly, Clara immediately shushing her. Those girls... who knew what they were capable of; she'd thought that going to university would put an end to the insanity. Change her name, cut her hair, do something mind-numbingly normal like joining a sorority; she thought she'd be able to keep off the radar.
“I'm sorry I got you into this,” she whispered to Greta.
“I'm not,” Greta replied.
Butler, Thomas. The Sorority: Clara Brown, book five. New York: Scholastic, 2023, pp 65.
Somehow, between helping Mom pick up the last of the Christmas provisions and helping Dad clean the gutters (which-- he has issues with heights, like 'I'm going to vomit everywhere' issues. Dad doesn't seem to remember that.), Peter gets Lyle to play Scrabble with him.
“Nerds,” Claire says with some affection and sits on the couch with a magazine.
“Me and my brother used to play Scrabble at Christmas,” he says. “Before the internet, you know?”
“That must have been a very long time ago,” Lyle jokes. Peter hardly looks any older than Lyle remembers - which makes him wonder about Peter's power and if he could choose to be immortal like Claire: if he would choose it - but he seems older, in the way he carries himself. Not that Lyle is in any shape to judge, he's probably just as bad.
“Haha,” Peter replies flatly. He gets a triple word score with 'bayonet'. “Don't you have any traditions?”
Lyle shrugs. His expensive college education isn't helping him much with this game.
“Yeah, we do,” Claire cuts in. “Remember how dad used to make us brownies on Christmas Eve and sit up with us, because the idea of Santa Claus freaked you out?”
“I don't remember that,” he says slowly. He tries hard to, like he's tried hard before to remember events, and when and where pictures were taken, but his mind is blank. Claire's expression falters and she looks back down at her magazine.
The doorbell goes, and before Lyle can rush to open it and get away from Peter's sympathetic eyes, Mom is there, hugging their guest. “Gretchen, it's so nice to see you, I hoped you'd make it!”
Claire drops her magazine. Lyle gets up and approaches the hallway as Gretchen and Mom chat amiably.
“Hi,” he says.
Gretchen tilts her head. “I'm 'tall and awkward with hair that only accentuates that fact' am I?” she asks, and he cringes at the quote from his last book.
“Yeah, about that-”
She laughs. “Come here,” she says, and opens her arms. It's a little weird, but then she is a little weird, that's why he likes her. “It's nice to see you, you little bastard.”
Claire stands in the living room doorway throughout the exchange. She doesn't speak, which is strange for Claire: normally people think Lyle is mute because Claire does so much talking and he does so little. Or that's the way it used to be; he supposes he can't really say who Claire is now.
“Hey,” she says finally, in a soft voice.
Gretchen raises her hand in a half wave and lets the corners of her mouth turn up, but no more.
“Why don't I show you where you're staying?” Mom says to Gretchen. “I'm afraid that we're kinda a full house right now.”
“Sure, that would great, Sandra.”
First name basis, that's something. He turns back to Claire. She's hugging herself, eyes unfocused and staring at the floor. “You okay?”
She rubs her eyes and shakes her head. “I can't,” she says, walks past him to the front door and out of the house.
-
As it turns out, Gretchen really loves Christmas. Like, she helps Mom with more food preparations, wraps gifts, strings popcorn, and writes out cards to drop around to the neighbours. Lyle ducks out of most of it, hiding out in his room, reading old comic books. Dad does too, leaving in the late afternoon without telling anybody.
It's not that Lyle doesn't want to spend time with Mom, and he's aware that the only people who are making any real effort are the people who aren't even family (plus Doug, but Doug's Doug - even with a hole through the hand he's enthusiastic), but it's frustrating, being a part of this family-- the least important part.
At some point, he falls asleep on his bed, and wakes only when a door is slammed shut. Through the thin walls of his room, he can hear Gretchen's voice: 'I can't help you through this if you won't talk to me,' she's saying.
'Not tonight,' Claire says, 'please.'
Lyle puts a pillow over his head and goes back to sleep.
-
Christmas Eve is a flurry of activity; Lyle hears Mom get up at six am to clean the house in preparation for his uncles' and aunts' arrival. He gets up a little while later and feels bad enough to offer his help. She gives him the turkey to stuff. It's really gross.
In the afternoon, Mom sets the table, and then manipulates everyone into going carolling. Everyone but Claire, that is.
“I don't sing,” Lyle says.
“I didn't ask you if you sang,” Mom replies.
“I'm not coming,” Claire says.
“Okay,” Mom replies, after a long pause.
They hand out cards and cookies to the neighbours; some of the neighbours look at Lyle strangely, like they want to ask where he's been all this time. He just looks away. Dad wears a hideous Christmas sweater, only to be outdone by Doug. They start trying to each sing the loudest, but Lyle's not sure if Doug knows that's what Dad is doing, or if he just likes singing loudly.
When they get home, Claire is standing in the driveway, arms crossed, pacing.
“Lyle,” she says, snagging his arm as he passes her. “We need to talk. Get in the car.”
“What? No.” Everyone else has gone back into the house. He considers yelling for Mom, but decides that might be a touch too dramatic.
“Get in the car, Lyle,” she repeats.
“I feel like I should tell a grown-up first.”
She glares at him until he relents. “Fine,” he says, “fine.”
She drives them a familiar route, and he soon realises where they're going: Costa Verde High School. He asks her a couple of times what she's up to, but she won't respond to him, only giving him directions like, 'get in' and 'get out' and 'shut up'.
She parks around the back of the school, near the chain link fence surrounding the bleachers.
“Come on,” she says, walking up to the fence and putting her foot into one of the links.
“You can't be serious,” he says as she scales the fence. “I can't get over that.”
She rolls her eyes, produces a hairpin from her hair and works it into the lock of the gate. She pulls it open a second later and he decides not to ask where she learnt to do that.
“What are we doing here?” he asks, following her up the bleachers, climbing them like steps.
“I wanted to talk to you. Without witnesses.” She stops. “Sit.”
“I could take you, you know,” he says. He's, what, approximately double her size?
“Right.” She drops down onto the bench and looks up at him expectantly. “So,” she says.
“So,” he echoes. “Are you going to tell me what's up, because you dragged me to this fucking hellhole of a school, and I kind of want to go home and get drunk.”
She blinks, “You didn't like it here?”
He stays standing. “No, Claire, I did not.”
“Oh, I didn't know.”
“Why would you, you never paid any attention to me.” What he wants to say is: you've always been impossibly selfish, when have you ever thought about me? but she's his ride and he doesn't want to be abandoned at the school. “Which doesn't even matter any more. Can we get on with this?”
“I'm really angry at you.”
“Really, because I never would have guessed.”
She leans forward and swats him on the leg. “You violated my trust and my privacy for money. And you made me fight with Gretchen.”
“Is there anything you can't make my fault?” He feels like a teenager again, arguing with her about who drank the last of the milk and why she wasn't able to finish her homework because he was playing World of Warcraft too loud.
“She thought the books were cute, and I didn't. If you hadn't written them, we wouldn't have read them, and none of this would ever have come up. Therefore: your fault.”
“And that's the only reason? 'Cause it didn't sound like that last night.”
She narrows her eyes. “You were listening to us.”
“You were talking kind of loud. It sounded like... you had additional issues, other than my massive betrayal.”
“Well,” she says, and hunches forward some. He knows what she's doing: it's what she used to do with Dad, make herself seem small and sad to gain sympathy. It worked on him, but it's not going to work on Lyle. “I don't know.”
“Tell me.” Jesus, if it'll move things along.
“Well,” she repeats. “It's just... everyone's getting older. Even you! You've got freaking wrinkles around your eyes!”
“Hey,” he protests weakly, dropping down onto the bench a couple of inches away from her. “I'm only thirty four.”
She smiles sadly and shakes her head. “I know, but. Dad had a heart scare, did you know that? The doctor said it was stress. And it scares me, that everyone's getting older and I'm not. How long can I be with Gretchen when I look young enough to be her daughter? I hate this.”
Lyle doesn't reply; he doesn't know what to say, and it's not like he can go online and get advice. It freaks him out too, that his sister's going to live if not forever then well past his death. He tries not to think about it.
“I don't know why I'm telling you this.” She sighs.
“Sometimes it's easier to tell people you hate things you wouldn't tell the people you love.” He shrugs.
She looks up quickly. “I don't hate you. I intensely dislike you at times, but I don't hate you.”
They smile at each other until it gets awkward, then look away. “For what it's worth,” he says, “I am sorry about the whole book thing.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That was a dick move.” She pauses. “But... I like, um, I like Nick. He's a good character. I like how he hasn't died.”
“Well, he has a small but dedicated fanbase; can't let them down.”
She seems pleased by this fact. “I don't know about Zeke being a secret Corporation double agent, though. That was pretty convoluted.”
“Yeah, but I didn't want to write him out after Clara left high school.”
She nods. “So, where's Kyle or Luke, or whatever.” At his raised eyebrows, she clarifies, “You know, you're 'Clara Brown' alter-ego.”
“Oh. He was in the original draft, but he was extraneous to plot, and I didn't want Norman to seem like a bad father because I couldn't be bothered to write scenes between them.” It makes sense; the character was dead weight, may as well focus on the protagonist.
“Wow, that's really pathetic.”
“What can I say? I'm pathetic. Speaking of, I saw West yesterday. He wanted to drop round. I told him you were gay.”
“Lyle, that's not nice.” She pauses. “The pathetic thing, I mean.”
“Whatever, Claire, he was and is a douchebag.”
“Oh, he wasn't.”
“He was.” He scoots a little closer to her. “Do you want to see him? I mean, Gretchen came all this way to sort things out with you. And Clara/Greta has a lot of fans.”
“Really?” She smiles briefly, glancing down at her hands. “No, I guess I don't want to see him. I just don't want things to be so hard any more.”
He bumps her shoulder. “In this family, that is never going to happen.”
-
At five to midnight, Lyle is marking exam papers on his bed. He was supposed to do it at least a week ago, but he honestly couldn't be bothered. Mostly because the average quality of them is profoundly depressing.
There's a knock at his door, and Claire pokes her head in. “Hey, can I come in?”
“Sure.”
“What are you doing?”
He waves a paper at her. “Marking.”
She comes over to his bed and picks up an essay. “This is... really bad.”
“I know, I think I'm about to get fired.”
She smiles - he lets her think it's a joke - and sits down on the bed. “Hey, do you remember how as kids we used to sneak downstairs after Mom and Dad had gone to bed, and shake our presents?”
He nods, and there's a tiny flash of relief on her face.
“Let's go look at our presents!” She grabs his hand and drags him out of the room. She holds a finger to her lips. “Be very quiet.”
He rolls his eyes, but follows her, holding her hand like they when he was four and she was five and they were scared that Santa was still in the house. They creep down the stairs, staying low to the ground. Claire stops after a moment and peers through the banisters.
“Oh my God,” she whispers.
“What?” he asks, and she points to the living room. It's dark but for the tree that's lit up and the silhouettes in front of it. He leans forward, over Claire's shoulder, and sees it: Mom holding a sprig of mistletoe over her head, her hand resting on the back of Dad's neck. Kissing.
“Oh my God,” he echoes.
Claire looks up at him and grins.
“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” he says.
“I know!” she says, a little too loudly. Their parents break apart, and she backs up quickly, shooing Lyle up the stairs.
Here's the copy of The Lost Son I promised you, try to actually finish reading it before you flip your shit and send me angry emails. Gretchen should enjoy it, I know how she has a soft spot for Clara/Greta.
About what you said on the phone last week, I might have to take you up on the offer. Me and the principal had a... disagreement over whether I sucked or not. Washington is nice this time of year, right? I hear there are some historical landmarks there, or something? But don't tell Dad, okay? He'll only flip out and do something to piss Mom off.
Bennet, Lyle. “Untitled.” Letter to Claire Bennet. 1 Dec 2027.