Fandom Agere 2.0

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Siobhan had been so fucking determined to get answers from Kendall. His behaviour just didn’t make sense, and more importantly, their father’s actions towards him didn’t line up. She was missing something and the anxiety clawing at her stomach told her that it was something important. Something that could undermine what she had finally accepted as genuine: a chance at the company, at the big seat.

So she cornered Kendall at the end of the day, tossed her questions and accusations at him. He seemed so uncertain, each response wavering. His eyes flickered down to the floor, then the wall behind her, only focusing on her face when she was talking. Even then, she had the sense that he was looking at her lips instead of her eyes.

“Fucking look at me,” Siobhan said, in the same calm tone that their father had always used when Kendall was struggling with eye contact as a child.

She watched his body language change, with a thrill of satisfaction: his shoulders dropped, and his head came up to allow his eyes to meet hers. Almost military precision, the lines of his body: coming to attention at her demand. This is what it will feel like, something whispered inside Siobhan. This is how everyone will react when you walk in a room.

“Shiv. It’s not gonna be me,” Kendall promised.

“Right.” God, he looked terrible. Why wasn’t anyone doing something about that? “You wanna tell me why?”

Siobhan watched him take a breath, wished she knew the calculations happening in his head. He nodded slightly, and for a moment she thought she was going to finally get the answers.

“Come here. Give me a hug,” Kendall said, moving towards her.

Siobhan almost recoiled in pure surprise. Kendall was notoriously uncomfortable with hugs, tolerating them while standing like a cooperative piece of wood. But here he was, her brother, saying “come here” again and moving towards her.

“Give you a hug?” Siobhan said, like she might have misunderstood, but she opened her arms to allow it, and she was wrapped up in her brother’s embrace. He held her so tight that her remaining doubts fled. He was shaking, she realized: not enough that she had been able to see it in his hands, but enough that she could feel it with him pressed against her.

“Hey,” Siobhan said, quietly, patting at his back. His fingers were digging into the fabric of her suit jacket, and she could hear his breathing, choked with the beginning of tears. “You okay?” God, she wasn’t built for this. She regretted ever asking.

Kendall pulled back a second later, his hand staying on Siobhan’s shoulder as if he needed to steady himself. Siobhan put her hand over his, staring his face as though she could find the answers there if she just looked hard enough. She watched him get his breathing back under control, get his balance back on his own, and then he stepped away from her.

“I would just ask that you take care of me,” Kendall said, and made eye contact again. “Because, uh, if Dad didn’t need me right now-” His gaze slid over to the wall behind Siobhan, and it took him a moment to find the words to continue. “I don’t exactly know… what I would be for.”

Siobhan’s entire heart felt like it was collapsing with some difficult-to-name emotion. She stepped closer, and Kendall didn’t flinch when she rested a hand on his shoulder. He looked down at the floor, and she could still feel him trembling under her palm.

“You wanna talk some more?” she asked.

“I- I really can’t.” The misery in his voice. The tears just barely held back. The way he leaned into her touch slightly. Siobhan didn’t anticipate her own next words.

“Do you want to get in the crib?”

“What?” Kendall looked up at her, startled. No, she realized: he looked panicked. Maybe they thought she didn’t remember that game. She had been maybe eleven when the basement had gotten cleaned out and the crib had been taken away, ending the game the three of them had played in it.

“Do you want to get in the crib?” Siobhan repeated. It was a crazy thing to offer, this relic of their childhood, a game that she barely remembered the rules of. But when they were younger, Kendall had liked playing it the most. And she and Roman had loved that: the eldest brother becoming the youngest brother. They had played it sometimes when things were hard for one of them. Apparently, it was still in her mind, some helpless attempt at comfort. “I don’t have an actual one, but… we could pretend.”

Kendall’s mouth opened and closed a few times, and he finally lost the battle against the tears that had been threatening this entire time. They mixed with the sweat on his face, a glistening mess of moisture.

“Y-yeah,” he managed. “Please.”

“Okay.” Siobhan took the folder from his hands that he had been fidgeting with throughout the conversation, laid it on the desk, and pulled a few tissues from a box. “Here, clean yourself up. I’ll call the car.”

--

Siobhan led the way up to their apartment, careful not to touch her brother. Part of her wanted to take his hand, but that would be starting the game too early. There was a way that this was done.

She hadn’t played this game in so many years: it felt different, now. As children, they had lived in the spaces between real and pretend. They had been each other’s monsters and knights, parents and children, dogs and horses and hunted rabbits. Some of the games had been combative, carefully concealed bruises to press on when they fought. Others had been co-operative, stories they crafted together.

To bring one of the games into their adult years was—powerful, somehow. It made Siobhan want to go through and pin down each of the games they had played, strip it apart to its bare essentials, try them all again. Feel the ways that they were the same and the ways they were different.

“Tom, can you head out to a café for a couple hours?” Siobhan called as she opened the door and gestured Kendall inside. He stayed close to the wall, eyes flicking around the apartment as if checking for other exits.

“Wh- Shiv, it’s almost midnight. What?” Tom’s voice, moving closer. He emerged from a hallway, face scrunched in confusion. He hadn’t changed out of his work clothes, but he was down to his trousers and button-up, tie and blazer discarded somewhere. He stopped when he saw Kendall, eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “What’s going on?”

“Sibling bonding time,” Siobhan said, opening the door and grabbing her wallet out of her bag. She gestured Tom over impatiently, and he walked over, still visibly baffled. She pressed her wallet into his hand and picked up his shoes from beside the door, shoved them into his other hand. “Two hours should be good, thanks, Tom.”

“I- okay?” Tom stepped through the doorway, looking back over his shoulder as Siobhan shut the door behind him and locked it.

Siobhan leaned against it and took a deep breath. That was one thing dealt with.

Kendall was struggling to get his shoes off without bending over, trying to pull his heels out of them with limited success. Siobhan let him struggle, putting away her coat and purse. When she came back, he’d managed to get them off and was looking down at his socked feet.

“Give me your coat,” Siobhan said, and he obediently shrugged out of it and passed it over. She hung that up as well. Kendall hadn’t moved from the entryway when she came back, standing vaguely in the middle of the hallway.

“You still want to play?” she asked, just because she had to. Kendall jerked his chin up and down in affirmative, which was enough for Siobhan. “Okay, come on.”

She led the way to the guest room, and then hesitated for a moment. She knew the general idea of how she would get around the lack of an actual crib, but she still needed to put it together. She pulled the duvet off the guest bed and tucked it into the corner between the bed and the wall, covering the floor with the edges up against the walls and the bed to make three sides of a square. More like a nest than a crib, but it would have to do.

She used the pillows to build the missing wall, pulling the duvet over a stack of three of them to finalize it. It was a small space, just as small as the crib they used to originally play. Hopefully it would be good enough.

“Okay, Kendall. Get in the crib.”

Kendall took off his suit jacket, hesitated for a second, and then dropped it on the floor. Siobhan sat against the footboard of the bed and watched him undress, unbuttoning his shirt slowly and then wiggling out of both shirt and trousers, leaving him in his underwear and socks. This was part of the game: clothing was often decreed by the rules of their games, the addition or subtraction of items a careful negotiation between them.

When Kendall was almost naked, he stepped carefully over the wall of pillows and folded himself down into the space. He barely fit, his back pressed against the wall and his knees bent up against his chest.

It had been like that with the crib too. Siobhan hadn’t thought of it in years, but she could suddenly picture it so clearly. It had been down in the basement of ‘the garden house,’ as they had called it when they were children. A storage space full of boxes and boiler pipes stretching underneath the house, perfect for staying out of the way and playing. In the corner, originally full of boxes, a crib: none of them were sure if it had been used by one of them as a baby.

They had taken out the boxes and climbed in one by one, and it had become the focus of a game that slowly developed as they got older. They all got taller, especially the boys, and it was a miracle that the crib never broke under their weight. But it lasted into their teen years, and Siobhan could remember Kendall’s knobbly knees having red lines impressed on them from the bars of the crib, after hours spent inside.

“Okay,” Siobhan said. There was a strange doubling to the moment, the memory of her brother at fifteen with acne across his cheeks and a pacifier in his mouth, curled up in exactly the same pose. Now, over twenty years later, arms wrapped around himself in her guest bedroom, he looked older and younger than she had ever seen him.

She didn’t have any of the tools that they had used to play ‘get in the crib’ back at their old house. And it was Roman who had often led the interactive pieces: the ‘daddy’ to Siobhan’s ‘mommy’ when Kendall was in the crib, his absence a gap in the scene that Siobhan would have to cover for.

Nothing was perfect. Siobhan had to press down the part of herself that wanted to call Roman and tell him to bring supplies. She doubted that he would want to play this game with them without making fun of it. And that wasn’t what Kendall needed right now.

But she had to give him something. He couldn’t be in the crib all alone.

She wracked her brain, trying to think of something soft that was in the house. A doll, a beanie baby, anything that might play the part? Finally, she remembered something: a hot pack shaped like a black cat, full of beans that you could stick in the microwave. Tom had bought it for her cramps one month, charmed by the idea. She had never used it, had tucked it away immediately, disturbed by its similarity to a stuffed animal.

That would come in handy now.

“Hey, baby, I’m going to go and get your stuffie now. Sit tight, okay?” Whoever was in the crib didn’t have a name: they were just baby for as long as they stayed there. They weren’t allowed to be called anything else. Sometimes, when Siobhan was tired of her brothers trying new nicknames, she had climbed into the crib just for the simplicity.

Kendall didn’t respond to her words, but Siobhan moved as fast as she could, collecting the little cat from the back of the closet where she had put it, behind a stack of extra pillows. It was heavy in her arms, a satisfying weight. She remembered that, from when she had put it away. It had upset her at the time. It had felt like an insult, somehow.

She took it back to the guest bedroom, stepped over the discarded clothes of Kendall’s adult life, and held out the cat.

“Here you go, baby. He doesn’t have a name yet. Maybe you should give him one.” Their stuffed animals had cycled through names, depending on who was in the crib: sometimes they were renamed even by the same person.

Kendall unwrapped his arms from around himself and reached out for the stuffed cat, taking it from Siobhan’s hands and holding it close against himself. He petted its head with one hand, and Siobhan watched tears spill down his cheeks anew.

That was normal, for Kendall. They all cried in the crib sometimes. Kendall more than the other two. He was also quieter, rarely speaking, as far as Siobhan remembered. Roman had fun with the baby talk, focusing on new sounds every few minutes until one of them gave him a pacifier mostly to make him quiet.

Siobhan… couldn’t remember if she had been quiet like Kendall. She could remember their turns in the crib so clearly, and she certainly remembered climbing inside for her turn, but she didn’t have the same memories of how she had acted.

Maybe she was protecting herself from the embarrassment. It seemed fine for her brothers to do, but she didn’t know that she could really face up to having played as the baby herself. It felt distant and almost frightening.

Siobhan pushed those thoughts aside, focusing on Kendall. She was not in the crib now, and she never had to be again. She would take care of her brother.

“Does the cat have a name, baby?”

Kendall nodded, tears still slowly dripping down his face. He held the cat up closer in front of him, so that it covered his chin and mouth from her view.

“What is it?” Siobhan pressed, hearing her own gentle tone and supressing a shudder. This was all so strange. But she didn’t want to stop.

There was a long moment before Kendall answered. Siobhan waited, knowing that he would get there eventually.

“Baby.”

“The cat is also called baby?” Siobhan said, raising an eyebrow.

Kendall nodded, looking serious.

“Okay, whatever you say goes.” Siobhan shook her head, unable to stop the smile that was on her face. “I guess his name is Baby now.”

Kendall was still holding the stuffed animal in front of his face, but Siobhan saw the crinkle of his eyes and knew that he was smiling as well. They sat in peaceful silence for a moment, Kendall pressing his nose against the back of the stuffed cat, almost nuzzling into the fabric, a little movement of his head left and right, left and right.

“Does baby want milk?” Siobhan asked, hearing the echo of Roman’s voice in her words. He had set so much of the script for this game: Siobhan and Kendall would have been happy to just sit in the crib, but Roman had wanted games and new elements, running to get more toys to introduce to the baby.

Kendall nodded, and ran a hand across his face to wipe away some of the tears. It seemed like they were passing now, but his cheeks were still wet with them.

“Milk and maybe a Kleenex,” Siobhan added. She stood up and Kendall’s eyes followed her across the room. She paused in the doorway. “Do you want something else?”

She waited out the pause. At this angle she could watch Kendall’s mouth working around the sounds, trying to make his voice work for a long moment.

“Snack?” he asked, carefully.

“You can’t-” eat in the crib, Siobhan was about to say. But that had been in the old house, where they had gotten in trouble for leaving apple cores in too many odd spots and been banned from eating outside of specific areas. This was her house, and she was certain that Kendall hadn’t eaten very much today. “Okay, I’ll get you a snack.”

She wasn’t sure what she had for a baby, but she would figure something out.

It wasn’t until she was in the kitchen that Siobhan remembered that Kendall was not, in fact, a baby, and would be able to eat basically anything she put in front of him.

She poured the milk into a water bottle with a spout that was enough like one of their sippy cups to fit the game, and took some leftover rice out of the fridge. With a flash of vindictive inspiration, she heated up the rice with a spoonful of butter and then mashed it down in the bowl until it resembled some kind of paste that you might, Siobhan imagined, feed to a baby.

She detoured to the bathroom to grab a box of tissues and returned to the bedroom with her arms full.

Kendall had changed positions while she was gone, leaning back against the far wall with his legs towards the pillows, giving himself slightly more space to spread out. The stuffed cat was resting on his knee, and he was twisting its arms around each other.

“Are you being nice to your cat?” Siobhan asked, slight disapproval in her voice. This role came back to her so easily. She never would have guessed, if she had ever stopped to consider it.

Kendall nodded, twisted his mouth, and then said, “he likes it.”

“Well, that’s alright then.” Siobhan put down the supplies on the bed, and scooted over so that she could be on the mattress above the makeshift crib. “Blow your nose first, then you can have a snack.”

Kendall accepted the tissue that she held out, and blew his nose vigorously on both sides, then held the Kleenex back up to Siobhan. She used a clean one to wrap it up and take it from him, then tossed it at the garbage in the opposite corner. She missed the can, but left it for now.

“Alright, baby. Time for snack.” She held up the bowl of mushed-up rice, one hand on the spoon. Kendall reached out, but Siobhan lifted the bowl out of his reach. “Ah-ah. Are you old enough to feed yourself?”

There was a moment where Kendall appeared to think that over, and then slumped and shook his head.

“That’s what I thought,” Siobhan said. Another thrill of victory through her, which she pressed down. This wasn’t the place for that. There was no success in pushing this version of Kendall around. “Open up.”

This was new for both of them. Siobhan had never fed someone else before. It was almost nerve-wracking, offering the spoon to him. She worried that she would push it too far in his mouth, or hurt his teeth. She held it just in front of his mouth and made him lean forward to reach it instead.

She felt the scrape of his teeth on the metal in her hand, a vibration through the spoon. He pulled back and made a little face at the taste of the bland mushed rice, but chewed and swallowed, then opened his mouth for more.

Little bird, Siobhan thought. But nicknames weren’t allowed when someone was in the crib, so she didn’t say it out loud as she gathered another scoop of rice and held it out for her brother.

They made their way slowly through the bowl, both of them gaining more confidence in the movements. Kendall stopped leaning forward for the food and just kept his mouth open until Siobhan put the spoon between his lips, no longer afraid of doing so.

When the rice was finished, Kendall sat back and gathered up the cat again, holding it close against his chest.

“Do you still want your milk?” Siobhan asked, wiggling the water bottle at him. Kendall opened his mouth and Siobhan laughed. “I can’t hold the bottle for you the whole time, baby. You’ve got to take it.”

Kendall shot her a remarkably innocent pout, but reached up a hand and accepted the bottle, then put the spout in his mouth and settled back down. Siobhan found herself wondering what it would be like to hold it for him. The angles in the ‘crib’ were all wrong, but if they were on a couch… and he had his head in her lap…

But you couldn’t play ‘get in the crib’ without the crib. That wasn’t how the game was done. Siobhan dismissed the thoughts, and reached out to run a hand through Kendall’s hair as he drank. She regretted it immediately: his hair was slick with product and sweat, tacky between her fingers. She petted him a few times more, just to make it clear that she wasn’t backing down, then took her hand away and pulled another tissue from the box to wipe it off.

Siobhan stayed on the bed while Kendall finished the bottle of milk, feeling the exhaustion of the day finally closing in around her. When he was done, he held the plastic bottle up in her direction. She took it and put it inside the bowl that had held the rice, stacked up to take to the kitchen.

“Song?” Kendall asked, bringing the stuffed cat back up to his face.

“A song? From me?” Roman had been the one with the songs, mostly. Siobhan had a half-memory of being in the crib and hearing his voice. He would skip between nursery rhymes, making up his own words for half of them, making both of them laugh. “Are you sure?”

Kendall nodded vigorously.

Siobhan drew in a breath and flicked through a catalogue of songs. Did she know anything that was suitable as a lullaby? She didn’t really remember the lyrics of anything well enough to just sing it on command.

A moment later she remembered that it wasn’t the eighties anymore, and pulled out her phone to Google the lyrics for a children’s song she remembered the tune to.

My bonnie lies over the ocean, my bonnie lies over the sea…

Siobhan sang the song through to the end, and then glanced over at Kendall. He looked like he was half-asleep, his head tilted sideways against the edge of the mattress from where he sat below her on the floor.

“Baby, you can’t sleep in there.” Maybe when they were teenagers, falling asleep curled up in the crib had been okay, but they didn’t have the spines for that anymore. “Kendall, come on.”

Kendall whimpered at the sound of his name, a little choked whining sob.

“Okay, sorry,” Siobhan said, backpedaling. “Baby, come be on the bed. You can sleep in the bed.” Kendall shook his head against the wall, back and forth. “Yes, you can.” Siobhan put the dishes and the Kleenex on the floor, then pulled back the sheets and reached over the edge of the bed to wrap her hands around Kendall’s forearms.

“Come on. You can be baby in the bed, I’ll allow it. Come here.” She pulled him gently towards her, and Kendall half-got his legs underneath him, using his elbows to pull himself up onto the mattress and then crawling up. “Atta boy,” Siobhan said, a foreign encouragement in her mouth, stolen from somewhere that she couldn’t quite remember.

Kendal wiggled towards her, tucked his head under her chin.

“Oh, that’s… I’m not staying here, Ke-baby. Where’s cat Baby? Here.” Siobhan extracted herself from the threat of a cuddle with her brother, pressing his stuffed animal into his arms instead. He curled up around it, allowing her to slip out of the bed. She grabbed the pillows from the floor and replaced them, Kendall raising his head for a moment to let her slip one underneath him. She pulled the sheet over him, then unmade the ‘crib’ and put the duvet over him as well.

“There you go.” Siobhan gathered up the dishes and stopped at the doorway, looking back to see Kendall tucked in, somehow looking young even with the stuffed animal hidden under the covers. That feeling throbbed in her chest again, some kind of painful affection.

“Sweet dreams, baby brother.” That endearment wasn’t really allowed, but she would make an exception this time.