So baby yes I know what I am Who: Kendal and Aldwin What: Exact definition unknown, but trauma fits in there somewhere. Where: Hathaway Mansion When: Late morning/noon
He was dying.
Nothing to it. Pure and simple. Dying and soon to be dead. Today’s death sequence was going to take place on the sofa, the scene of yesterday morning’s first crime. It hadn’t been a crime at the time, because drinking could never be a crime, not really, but now it was going to lead to accidental murder. Aldwin’s murder. Curse you, mimosy goodness!
He was carefully placed - in a position that looked like he had fallen over the back of the sofa from the other side and slept in, but hadn’t really... of course - with one leg up the back of the furniture and over the edge, one hand over his chest, the other dangling lifelessly off the seat edge, fingers tips brushing the floor, and his head lolling off in a similar sort of way. Carefully placed, clearly.
He was dying. Nothing to-- Oh. Well, he was dying anyway.
At least, that was what he had been telling himself since the hour of bliss between drunken stupor and hangover had passed. Dying and soon to be dead. His brains were... imploding or something similar to that. They’d be pouring endlessly - for his brains were massive, this fact seemed imprinted in his mind - from his ears and his nose soon. Like a river of red pu-- No, that wasn’t a good subject to think about.
He grumbled wordlessly, eyes clamped shut. Dying, dying, dying, dying...
With a keen eye for detail, Kendal was sat on the stairs, trying to figure out if she had ever worn her shoes before. Or, indeed, if she even liked them. But then, did it matter? It wasn’t as though she had even bought them--they had been a present from... uh, someone? Which probably meant she didn’t like them, but whatever, they were on her feet now. And anyway, she had a vital question to ask her precious baby brother that Gwyn--the sister she had somehow forgotten to welcome home--simply would never be able to answer adequately.
Besides, the Princess wasn’t the one groaning on the couch and probably in need of a sick bag. Darling little Aldie was 1, probably unable to get away from her without being sick, and 2, something almost resembling her intended target audience for later. Tip-toeing into the living room in today’s ensemble, she leaned over the side of the sofa, hovering over his head. Her shirt was open and almost hanging off, but then that was the point of the exercise. She waited a moment, debating on whether to just hang there until he noticed or actually actively seek his attention. The former seemed a little creepy, if not marginally entertaining, so she opted for the latter.
Hands clasped behind her back, she leaned further over--briefly considering pulling him off the sofa altogether--and whispered; “Good morning, Starshine.” The earth says ‘hello’! She loved that movie.
Aldwin had identified the other presence - huh, sounded like he was with a ghost or something - as Kendal before she spoke. She usually came with a severely not-warm-or-fuzzy-or-marshmallowy-in-the-slightest kind of feeling, and it was unique to her. Like her own signature scent. Of course, the warning did little good when he couldn’t escape. He was a trapped deer on the Serengeti, pinned by a ferocious cat of some kind. With claws. And big fuck off teeth.
“Mmrrrggggnnhhh.” He was far beyond the most articulate of hangover sufferers. So far beyond, in fact, that he fell off one side of the scale and ended up right back at the bottom. Happy days. For a few moments he flat out refused to open his eyes. She was whispering and that meant she was close. Hell.
One eye wormed its way open, the other following a split second later.
Boobs.
Boobs.
Boooobs.
Boobs?
Boobs.
If some part of him didn’t fear hurting her, Aldwin’s flail would have been one worthy of epic poetry. As it happened, his disturbed shudder slid him out of his place on the couch and stuck into an uncomfortable halfway position between the couch and floor, where his shoulders were flat on the ground, his back was arched up the side of the sofa and his legs were above his head, knees pressed to his chest.
He stayed there for a moment. All was lost. Now he would die without dignity, without integrity, without-- He wriggled out his of newly adopted shape and then sat himself cross legged, facing the coffee table. His internal speech would be continued later. When he could open his eyes without fear of cleavage. After his sister had gone far, far away.
It was easy enough to ignore Aldwin’s amateur dramatics. It happened too many times for it to have any effect on Kendal. Besides, the stage was hers right now. “Aldwin?” The name was perched innocently on the edge of a question. Make no mistake, there was to be more. She just didn’t quite feel like voicing it all yet, content to let her brother stew in his apparent trauma. Her gaze rested somewhere to her left while she kept up the pretense of having to actually think about what was coming next. As if she had not intended to put him through this since she first began to dress. “You’re male, correct? How much... How much experience do you have with breasts, exactly?” What? “I mean, I know you got that girl knocked up, etcetera, but that really doesn’t require advanced--” She cut herself off before that monologue that she had been thoroughly enjoying got a little too ridiculous. It was best to keep it simple sometimes.
Huffing as though he had done something to upset her trail of most vital thought, she shifted her weight onto one hip and opened her shirt as far as possible. “As a man, Aldie--Aldie... Aldie!” She kicked at his shoulder, demanding his attention. “I know you’re listening, Aldwin. I need your opinion.” The tone was one that should be attached to a pout, though there was not one in sight. Petulance with a hint of “before I start kicking more vital areas”. A la Kendal. “For once, I actually want to hear something you have to say and you’re--what are you doing? I swear, if Melody has you meditating or something I am going to kick you out of that as well.” Really, the levels of attempted harmony in this house were nauseating.
Aldwin was in his happy place. Not that happy place, but a happy place. Sort of, but not really. What he was trying to do was block her out. Her. The devil. The she-witch. The heathen.
No, it wasn’t working. How could it work when he - the vessel of sheer manly good looks and charm that he was - was being physically assaulted? Assaulted. Physically. By a half naked harpy in lingerie. The thought of it was so profoundly disturbing. He had to keep dragging his hungover thoughts from a gutter mind that he seriously did not want anything to do with. Oh she was evil, purest of the pure.
Therapy. She was paying for it. Well, someone was going to have to at this rate.
“I’m not meditating,” he told her begrudgingly, “I’m blocking you out.” The heathen. Whatever happened to modesty, honour-- integrity?! Were they so dead? He was being dramatic, yes! but that was for the greater good. Clearly this was a defence mechanism, developed over years of being tortured by three older sisters. The fact that only one of them was out-rightly... torturous didn’t matter, it was the thought, the concept that mattered. The damage was done. No salvaging the pieces.
He was going to die without dignity and without sanity, and the list was only going to grow whilst the youngest of the elders was present. He was not going to be opening his eyes.
“Oh, you’re kidding.” Not that she thought he was joking, it was just a pathetic attempt. If he truly wanted to avoid her, he would relocate. To somewhere she could not follow. His room didn’t count, because he’d have to make it up the stairs first. Somehow she doubted he was capable. “For real? ... Aldie, sweetheart, open your eyes before I strip completely, take polaroids of the two of us together and xerox them to hang around town.” She paused, foot tapping out her impatience. “Aldie, I just want one little opinion. Just one. I swear.”
And if he didn’t open his eyes, she was going to do far worse than the promised polaroids. Openly disgusted by how much effort she was actually having to go through to achieve this one little goal, Kendal sighed. And the Town Idiot found himself seated beside the Town Whore as she dropped herself rather elegantly onto the floor beside him. “I’ll redecorate your room for you while you’re out,” she threatened in tones of sweetness. “It’ll be just like mine. We could be room-twins!” Complete with Kendal-made painted pornography. A moment passed and she dropped the cute act, resorting to regular threats. “Open your freaking eyes, jerk, or I’m calling Melody.” She wasn’t going to let Aldwin spoil her fun. Even if she had to drag the ... hippy into the matter.
With his lips turned down into a frown - it was a pout, but he wasn’t going to admit to that - Aldwin kept his eyes closed for as long as he could risk it. He had to think strategy here. Kendal was clever and wouldn’t be out smarted easily, and his brain was hardly functioning at top speed. He was sure, he hoped - which meant he wasn’t actually sure, that she didn’t have a camera on her at that precise moment, which meant he would have time to make an escape whilst she got one. But he didn’t know that for sure - he knew more than a few girls who kept their phones stored in the more voluptuous areas of their person and, though his sister was not wearing much in order to cover potential storage facilities, he couldn’t and wouldn’t bet his life, and reputation, that there wasn’t an electronic harbinger of hell hidden somewhere on her.
Which meant he had to open his eyes. Didn’t mean he had to look at her straight away though. He focused his attention on the edge of the coffee table. Gripping stuff, that coffee table, many a good things had happened around it, besides it... on it. He really had to give that girl a call, once he remembered her name. Was it one girl? Was it a pair of twins? Oof, twins. They were a god given gift. No wait. Those twins weren’t the coffee table. They were the dining table. Oh yeah. He remembered them. So who was the--
He pointed a finger in her general direction. “No re-decorating,” he said with a wave of his finger. You spawn of Satan, you.
Slapping his finger away harder than was necessary--because sometimes a little pain was conducive to achieving the response she wanted--Kendal just stared at him for a moment before returning to the matter at hand. “So anyway, I need to know what you--as a self-proclaimed man--think this bra says to men in general.” She turned so he could see them at their best. Well, her cleavage was always at its best, but that was beside the point. Her two trails of thought were placing bets on whether or not she could actually get him to look. “You have seen tits, right? You’re not one of those guys who prefers to do it with the lights off and clothes on? Because that’s just weird.” Well, it was.
One hand was waved in front of his face. She was more than willing to share her own thoughts regarding that coffee table, but she thought they might actually break him in his delicate condition. They had certainly nearly broken the coffee table. “Could you at least have the courtesy to look me in the face?” Because, let’s face it, breasts have their own gravitational pull as far as vision is concerned. She knew hers did. All she needed to do was to get him to turn his hungover little head. “Please. I’ll even get you something for your hangover,” she chimed. It would be tequila, of course, since the best cure for a hangover was more alcohol. Just ask dearest Gwyneth.
I’m a ho, please give me money? Was Aldwin’s first thought. It was going to be his first thought whether he looked or not and, right now, he wasn’t going to be looking ever. Ever. He knew for a fact - a sort of fact, an Aldwin fact, a fact that was really a hopeful idea that he told himself was a fact - that Kendal wasn’t the kind-- Well, she was a ho, so that did make her the kind of girl, but she also had an entire trust fund at her disposal which meant she wasn’t in need of sleeping with people for money. Yes that did make his opinion sort of invalid and, as much as it pained him to think about it (we’re talking serious physical pain here, people: he was dying, remember?), Kendal probably wasn’t wearing cheap lingerie that could associate her with cheap hoes. But she was having a very Catholic school girl moment, and that was going to scar him for the rest of his life, which meant his first thought was sort of a little bit valid. Yet that still didn’t mean he was going to tell her that.
She was going to do something evil any second now, though, something more evil than this. And that meant he was going to have to look at her. In the face. The face. The face, the face, the face, the face, the face.
Okay. Eyes to the ceiling. Turn a little bit. Back the other way a little bit. Like your on one of those claw machine thingies. Right, down a bit. Down a bit more. Okay, we have hair! Now a forehead. And now eyes! Houston we have a visual.
This was going well. Now he just had to keep his eyes on her face.
“Okay. I’m looking at you,” You foul witch of the undergrowth, “State your business.” He was in a life or death situation, melodrama was a right.
“Uh, yeah, I can see that, genius.” Seriously, there were times Kendal really doubted her genetic attachment to any of these people. At least she and pre-accident-Melody had had some kind of connection on the bitch front. Now she was in a house with... aliens. But whatever, she had important business to attend to. “So,” she wiggled slightly to get more comfortable, the movement temporarily giving her cleavage life of its own, “Is this too much? Really. And I need an honest answer.” Again, the shirt was opened properly--to the point that it blocked out anything with half a foot either side of her, ideally funnelling her target’s vision straight to one very important point.
“And I mean ‘too much’ in a... Well, no, you know what I mean, right?” She just looked at him expectantly. It didn’t matter that he obviously didn’t know what she meant, or that there was no such thing as ‘too much’ in Kendal’s world. Just that he caved. Because those strings she was pulling? Yeah, she could keep this up all week with a variety of different bras. Suck it, little bro.
Aldwin had turned his head away from his sister again. With another of his valued finger waves, he told her, “Look, I’m tired and I’m emotional. Can’t you spare your most precious only brother his sanity?” That wouldn’t work, but he might as well have said it. He shuffled over in the direction away from his sister. Maybe he could make a run for it now she was sat down.
He frowned and sucked in his cheeks. Okay. What “too much” had she meant? He shuddered with the thought of what that could mean. Did it mean (gasp!) see through? Aaaahhhhh! No! No mental image! No mental image! Nooooo! Aldwin’s eyes clamped shut and his arms began waving in karate chop sort of motions. He was fighting off the mental image... obviously.
After a moment of what can only be described as quite spasmodic “virtual fighting”, he stopped. And then opened his eyes. “Right. If I look, you’ll leave me alone. Right? For the rest of the day. No, the rest of the week, yeah?” Bargaining modes are go. These were hostile negotiations - they could get ugly.
“Only brother,” Kendal corrected, once again slapping the finger away and shuffling back towards him. “And you’re only hungover, stop being such a raging queen about it.” Her tone smacked of boredom, and she was actually examining her nails while pointedly refusing to close her shirt at the same time. Her thoughts turned to her selected lingerie’s target audience. A proclaimed telepath. Now that? was something Kendal wanted to sink her claws into. Someone who could read your mind during sex was god’s gift to--well, everyone, actually. Unless you were a eunuch. Or impotent. In the case of the latter, it sucked to be you.
Actually, now that she was thinking about it, she had to wonder if she had ever slept with a telepath before. She had to admit the odds were in her favour there, and she had had some amazing--”What the fuck, Aldwin?” Was he being serious? “Okay, so Mel got her head crushed and she’s officially more normal than you.” Personality transplant and supernatural bullshit aside. She still didn’t turn into Kung Fu Panda at the notion of seeing someone in their underwear. Staring at her brother until he stopped, she batted him on the forehead. “That was for being an idiot.”
Eyeroll. Kendal had never been one to compromise. And when you thought about it, he was asking the impossible of her. She had to, what... Stop being herself for the rest of the week. Ummm... No. “Inasmuch as I physically can, given that we live in the same house? Done!” She beamed at him. “Now come on, Aldie, I don’t have all day.”
Hell. He’d just agreed to looking at his sister’s boobs, hadn’t he? Covered or not! the thought was disturbing. Oh god, I can’t decide if now would be the perfect time to awaken my gag reflex of doom. To puke on the sister or not to? Ugh, questions, questions. With his face already in a pained expression, eyes barely open, Aldwin mechanically started turning his head to look at his sister. This was going to be painful. So painful. Like, vampires getting staked painful. Or even better! People getting staked painful. He glanced down for as fewer seconds as he deemed safe and then snatched his around again to face the wall on the opposite side to his sister.
“It’s fine,” he croaked, “Not too much at all!” He managed to fight the urge to fling his arms in the air for emphasis. He was going to curl up and die soon enough. Now preferably, in fact. If the bitch-face could leave him rest in peace it would be fantastic. He wasn’t even going to let himself linger on the horror he had just witnessed. He was thinking happy thoughts but, again, not that kind of happy, not so soon after that experience anyway. Screwing anyone would be out of the question for at least a... day. Sober sex was so far out of the window it was unbelievable. Why couldn’t Kendal have been cut off instead of Mel? Oh right, whacked out freaky visions and shit.
Perfect.
Oh god, this was too precious. The cogs were visibly turning in Aldwin’s head as Kendal looked on. She wondered if it was too late to throw a spanner in there... No, definitely too late, he was looking. Oh well, she could save whatever her brain was trying to fit in for another day. Like, tomorrow. Jesus, he had actually believed her when she said she’d leave him alone? Not the brightest, baby bro. Really. But she wished she honestly did have a camera on her just to immortalise that expression on his face. Committing it to memory, she resolved to paint it for him. Maybe on the back of his bedroom door, though right above his bed seemed like a better idea.
“So, I have a fine rack?” Yes, she was well aware he had not said those words in that order. In fact, he had only said one of those words. But he was ‘tired and emotional’ and she was just considerate enough to string them together for him. And, of course, now that she had said it out loud, he may as well have said it himself. She was, naturally, merely paraphrasing. In the extreme.
What?! He hadn’t said that. She was putting the words in his mouth! Ooooh, evil. Aldwin considered the chances that Kendal would relay this conversation onto a third party. She wouldn’t be telling any of her friends, at least, because it was doubtful that she even had any. Would she tell any of her, uuuh, partners? He shuddered mentally again. Sober sex was so far out of the question now it wasn’t even funny. Not that not being able to do it was ever funny when it happened to him. It had been damned hilarious when one of his friends had gotten the clap off some exchange student, though there was a chance she had received it from Aldwin first. A big chance, in fact. Huh.
“I did not say that,” he said, hands out with his palms down, “I said your, uh, bra was fine. As in OK. Yeah? Got that? Good.” He rubbed his forehead. The trauma that Kendal brought with her was starting to pass and the hangover sickness was starting to take back its rightful, severely irritating place. That meant he was going to have to hurl pretty soon. He climbed to his feet, a little faster than he planned to, and wound up with his palms pressed to his knees, bent forward a little. Throwing up on the coffee table would ruin so many good memories.
“This torture sequence right here? Is over,” his mood was rapidly disappearing, though he wasn’t all that good to begin with. He made a vague swiping notion with one hand, as though he was demonstrating the end of the conversation. Then he straightened up. Yep, there was the need to hurl right there.
Yeah, so, Aldwin was saying one thing and Kendal really only heard what she was interested in. She had a fine rack in a fine bra, was what her brother was essentially saying whether he realised it or not. And she would be spreading this around her acquaintances for the rest of the day. They didn’t even have to be people she liked or people who liked her. Just those she could pretend to know the names of. Switching off any interest she had in her little brother and his behaviour, she started buttoning up her shirt. From the bottom, naturally. Any psychological damage she was causing was to be prolonged. Why? Because Aldwin was the littlest Hathaway. It was his birthright to be put through whatever his elders had to throw at him. And to follow in their daddy’s consecrated, gold-gilded and generally god-given fucking footsteps.
“Ohh, grumpy,” Kendal sang through a mocking pout. Still, she wasn’t stupid enough to press a drunkard’s buttons and stay within range of projectile vomit. With her buttons done up as high as her lack of shame would allow--maximised cleavage ahoy--she stood, the picture of grace, and moved back to the doorway. Her shoes were left behind. She had decided she didn’t like them after all. Someone else could pick them up. Or adopt them. “A bloody mary will fix that, Aldie.” Any concerned, responsible big sister would do the same for their little brother. She was only thinking about his liver. “The kitchen’s fully equipped.” But as if she was actually going to make him one. Blowing a kiss, she skipped back up the stairs to find more appropriate footwear. Operation Traumatise Aldie Yet Again Issue No. 987676 had come to close. Places to go, people to do, as they said.
She was gone. Some small relief for him. He slid back onto the couch and wrestled a cushion over his face to block out the sunlight.