Adelaide hasn't laid eyes on either one of them since she was sixteen years old, but she has dreamed up their voices, their expressions, even the way their worn flannel feels, so often that it has made her, the nap queen of the world, hesitate to sleep. Everything about them has always felt more, meant more, and everything beside them was pale and listless in comparison. Seeing those things even just in her dreams at night could ruin her for days afterward, making her distant and snappish inside the actual, real life that was in front of her to live. The comedown was just too sharp.
And now they're standing in front of her and she doesn't know what to do. They looked precisely the same when she saw them last, so much so that it makes her already bursting heart feel like it will definitely not make it through another beat. The joke, the curse, it's all so them and she feels like she is the only one who has changed at all.
Her laugh is a watery bubble of a sob-thing, and her hand goes up to cover her mouth like she's trying to push it back inside. She still has no idea what she's doing, her brain has not engaged or caught up. "You look like the best damn thing I ever saw," she says, finally, before she moves across the small space, stepping over steaks, and she pushes straight into her brother's chest and buries there like a tiny redheaded tick. Her sunglasses fall off her head and clatter to the floor and are ignored like so many of the complicated details that she is just not thinking of yet. Letters, babies, husbands, Hellhounds, Mayors... none of it falls into place yet and she can only hold on.