Who: Gavin and Aaron When: late afternoon, Friday, June 8 Where: the Porch Status: complete
Aaron had woken up practically giddy on Friday. He’d had dreams of holding Mila and their baby girl in his arms, and even asleep he felt like he was reaching levels of happiness that he’d never touched before in his life. There was so much to do, and it would be hard, but he was looking forward to all of it at this point, even the crying in the middle of the night and the dirty diapers. He just couldn’t wait to be a father and prove to everyone he could do it.
But first things were first -- they had to get married. Now that they had an idea of a date, Aaron wanted to talk to his family and get the ball rolling on stuff. He was full of energy that morning as he kissed Mila goodbye, and did some chores around the house before it was time to go in for his shift at the bar. Gavin was supposed to be there too, which only made Aaron more excited, because he wanted to talk to him about being his best man. It was a little nerve-wracking too, because he knew Gavin might say no, but Aaron hoped he didn’t. He did love Adrian like a brother now, but he wanted his brother with him. The brother who had become like a father figure to him throughout most of his life, in spite of all his flaws.
Aaron got changed and headed to the bar when it was time, singing along with the radio and drumming on the steering wheel. He didn’t think he’d felt this good in a long time, like seeing that sonogram image of his daughter had clicked something into place in him. He was halfway to the bar when he realized he’d forgotten said sonogram on the fridge, but oh well. Gavin probably wouldn’t care to look at it anyway. There was other stuff to talk about. Aaron parked in the back and headed inside, starting to look around for his brother.
Gavin had felt a bit jittery since his talk with Mila, unsure if he should talk to Caden about it or not and eventually deciding against it. He'd carry this one alone because he had a feeling Caden might take it all the wrong way and cause problems where there didn't need to be any. There were a few patrons in but most of them were seated at the tables and Gavin was struck yet again with how strange it was not to have Joseph at the bar bringing down the mood. Another thing to feel guilty about: Gavin liked that he wasn't there.
He was manning the bar while Miles ran some errands and when Aaron appeared in the doorway he instantly thought about all the things he wasn't supposed to know. The baby's gender, the wedding date, that there was a wedding. So he nodded casually at his brother when he entered and tried to look normal. "Good, you're here, I was itching for a smoke." Which he absolutely should be allowed to do within his own establishment but laws were stupid.
If Gavin was up front alone, that meant that Miles wasn’t there, which was mildly disappointing. Aaron had wanted to talk to him as soon as possible, before the bar got Friday-night busy, but it looked like one of them was going to have to cover the front either until Miles got back or one of the girls came in or something. “Okay, uh ... lemme know when you got a few minutes,” he said, giving Gavin a crooked little smile. He glanced around the bar just to get a sense of where everyone was and if they needed refills, then reached for one of the towels under the bar.
"Good man," Gavin muttered and patted him on the shoulder as he headed out, wincing as he realized 'good man' sounded a lot like best man and he felt like he was showing his hand. He wasn't of course, he was just being paranoid and even if he was, Aaron probably wouldn't pick up on it.
The smoke break was more than a little welcome, it gave him a few minutes to clear his head and think about what a natural reaction to the news would be when they weren't coming from Mila. He did support them this time around, which made his past decisions sting even worse, but it felt fake somehow to be happy for them after what he'd done. Oh well, he could fake it. He'd meant it when he said he only wanted Aaron to be happy.
By the time he returned to the bar, Miles was back, chatting up a storm with one of the customers and Gavin whistled at him, gesturing to the bar. "Got a few minutes now," he told Aaron, indicating to the back with a tilt of his head. "Everything okay?"
Aaron got busy while Gavin was gone, falling into those automatic routines that kept everything running smoothly. He greeted Miles happily when he showed up, but kept working until Gavin reappeared. “Yeah, yeah,” Aaron assured him with a bright smile as he approached the door to the back. Everything was better than okay, but he didn’t blame his brother for assuming there might be a problem. Their lives were just chock full of that kind of shit, so it was really nice to have some good news for a change. Or what he hoped would be good news to Gavin. After last time, who even knew. He waited until they were back in Gavin’s office and shut the door behind him, then gave him another big grin. “So we went to the doc yesterday, found out that we’re having a girl!” he announced, spreading his hands a bit.
Gavin nodded and smiled. He wouldn't have made a big hurrah about it if he was hearing about it for the first time so he wasn't going to try to fake it now. "Makes it more real, doesn't it," he said instead with a little smile. "Guessing you didn't mind either way, as long as the baby's healthy." He could have offered up some bullshit about how different it was to raise a girl than a boy but even as a father of two, he didn't feel qualified. He'd been absent a lot so what the hell did he know.
That was about the reaction that Aaron expected, so he didn’t question it at all, just nodded his agreement. “I would’ve loved a boy too, but ... I dunno, something about having a daughter feels right,” he said, moving to help himself to a seat in front of Gavin’s desk. He kind of wished now that he had cigars for them or whatever the tradition was ... but it wasn’t like Gavin was thrilled about it for him. As far as Aaron knew, his brother still thought he was a useless piece of shit who couldn’t afford or handle a family. But that was okay, that wasn’t really what he was here for. “But we were talking about the wedding of course, and we decided on a date, July 21st. It’s like, soon but not too soon, you know?” Aaron drummed his fingers on the edge of the seat between his legs, and smiled at Gavin again. “So I wanted to ask you ... will you be my best man?”
Gavin knew this was coming and he hadn't been sure how to feign surprise but the question coming from Aaron was a completely different one than it was coming from Mila and he couldn't help but smile at his brother. "Of course, I'd be honored," he said. "Not that I know jack shit about what to do as a best man but uh, I know how to use the internet. Twenty-first, huh? Less than two months to plan and get things ready. I'm guessing you're not planning on a big one? Do you want a church wedding?" He'd asked Mila the same thing so he made sure to ask Aaron that since that had been his natural reaction.
The way he didn’t hesitate filled Aaron with more of that bubbly joy he seemed to be flooded with lately. He did hear the rest of Gavin’s questions, but he couldn’t help but bounce up from his chair and close the gap between them to hug his brother before he answered. Aaron squeezed him tight with a little happy groan, then let go and stepped back again, still grinning. “Nah, not a big one, and since it’ll be summer and nice, we decided to make it a beach wedding. Since St. Dismas burned down and all,” he said with a shrug. “So ... ceremony on the beach, reception on the pier, just family and close friends. All I really know about best-manning is you gotta organize the bachelor party and like, stand up there with me.” Aaron huffed a little laugh. “Make sure I don’t forget the ring or fuck it up somehow.”
"Pretty sure there's a speech involved too," Gavin said with a wry smile, which was really the only part of the deal he was pretty sure he'd be awful at. Getting Aaron drunk and paying some strippers to dance on him was no big deal and Gavin was pretty good at keeping things organized, he ran a bar after all. Speaking in front of his family and Mila's family - and Mila! - that was something else entirely. "Maybe you should ask Caden to do the speeches," he said before he thought it through, wincing a little at the thought. "He'd hate being the second best." The best candidate in their family for doing speeches was Joseph who was unafraid of speaking loud and clear to anyone who'd listen, he just rarely had anything nice to say. Gavin had not inherited that particular trait. He mumbled, he felt awkward around too many people and the only times he could confidently speak over a loud group of people was when he was telling them it was closing time and they needed to get the hell out of his bar.
Aaron scoffed and rolled his eyes. “He would probably rather die,” he said. As much as Aaron loved him, he didn’t think he wanted to know what Caden would say in a speech at his wedding anyway. It would probably end up awful, or short enough to feel insincere and a different kind of awful. Aaron was pretty sure he wasn’t even on the short list of people Caden liked, much less wanted to speak in public about. “You don’t have to do a speech,” he went on, giving Gavin a crooked smile. “We can just skip all that. But I do want you to stand up with me, if that’s okay.” The last bit came out a little unsure, because that could be awkward for Gavin too, but it was kind of an important part of it all. “Mila’s gonna ask Roxy to be her maid of honor.”
Gavin didn't think much of Aaron's answer, he was sure Caden would hate being second best anything and so Aaron's words seemed right. It was probably best Caden didn't do the speech anyway, their brother often came through when they needed him but out of the three of them he had inherited most of Joseph's venom. "I'll stand up with you and I'll do a toast," he told Aaron, patting his shoulder. "Might not be much of a speech but we're gonna do this right. All of it." He watched Aaron's face carefully for a moment and squeezed his shoulder. "As your best man it's my duty to ask you if this is what you really want," he murmured with a crooked smile of his own to let Aaron know he was mostly joking. Aaron looked happy about it all and he was going to be a dad so if there was such a thing as fate then that obviously was what was in the cards for him.
Aaron beamed at the first part, beyond pleased that Gavin wanted to do the whole best man thing for him. Aaron had been pretty young when Gavin had married Olivia, and they hadn’t had much of a wedding to speak of. At least not a happy, celebratory one like he wanted to have with Mila. The semi-question didn’t really faze him, his smile still bright and zero doubt in his expression. “Absolutely, this is all I really want,” Aaron assured him. He did have some vague career goals, he supposed, like he would’ve liked to own his own shop like Gavin owned the bar, but his happiness depended on that sort of thing a lot less than it depended on being loved and having a family. A family he would not fuck up like Joseph had fucked up all of them. Aaron lifted his hand to squeeze Gavin’s upper arm in return. “It means a lot to me, thank you,” he added.
"It means a lot that you asked," Gavin admitted in a mutter. "I know I'm not always- I haven't always been there for you." The words were already out but he didn't want to do this anymore so he let that be enough and smiled at Aaron again. "We'll make it a good one, don't worry. And trust me when I tell you you don't want your bachelor's party the night before the wedding. We'll give you a couple of days to recover. Twenty first of July, right? I better start planning something soon." That had gone better than he'd hoped, Aaron didn't seem to suspect he already knew so he obviously hadn't completely failed his poker face.
The acknowledgement was unexpected but it rang true to Aaron, and it was cathartic to hear Gavin say just that. They didn’t need to go in depth about it. He just smiled back and swallowed down the emotion that threatened to block up his throat. God, he was going to turn into the biggest sap in the entire world when his daughter was born, he could feel it already. Aaron knew that those kinds of displays of emotion made Gavin uncomfortable though, so he kept it to himself and just laughed a bit at the bachelor party advice. “That sounds good to me,” he said. “I wanna be hungover as fuck. I told Mila she could get some strippers too for her bachelorette party, but I dunno what they’ll actually do.” Aaron chuckled.
Gavin wasn't the biggest fan of strippers and male strippers always turned his stomach. Male nudity wasn't the problem, but that flashy gross way they conducted themselves just seemed weird to him in a man. The idea of the girls getting male strippers made him grimace a bit and he shook his head. "Nah, Mila's pregnant, they'll take her to a spa or something. Do some nice girly things." At least that's what he wanted to think, there'd be a penis cake involved or something but Roxy wasn't going to get her pregnant friend drunk. "You're getting wasted though, we'll make sure of that." That he could do, that and strippers. It was probably the easiest part of being best man.
Strippers probably weren’t as much fun sober, that was true. Aaron didn’t know for sure, he’d always been drunk at every strip bar he’d been to. A spa day for Mila did sound nicer. Whatever they did, he trusted Roxy to show her a good time. And it sounded like Gavin would make sure he got the same, which made him more happy than he could say. “Hell yeah,” Aaron said with a grin. The possible consequences of all of them being drunk together didn’t even cross his mind. All of the family secrets were far from Aaron’s brain at the moment, he just couldn’t wait to have a blast with his brothers, celebrating a step in life he was stoked to be taking. He almost told Gavin that he wanted to invite Adrian too -- he wasn’t sure if he would want to go, a strip club might be Too Much too soon, but then he remembered that Gavin didn’t know Adrian was still alive yet. A puzzled sort of look crossed his face and he tilted his head a bit. “Oh hey, uh ... there’s some other news, too.”
Mila hadn't said anything about more news so Gavin felt a little apprehensive going forward and he gave Aaron a questioning look before smiling faintly. "Happy news, I hope. As your best man I'm vetoing all bad news until after the wedding." Aaron's expression was hard to read which was a little worrying because Aaron tended to be an open book, but now he looked... No, Gavin wasn't sure what that look was. He could just hear Mila telling him that Aaron didn't need to know anything that could destroy him so it couldn't be related to the past.
It was happy news, at least to Aaron. It was just weird news at the same time, and he hoped Gavin didn’t ask him a bunch of questions about it, because he wasn’t sure what Adrian wanted them to tell people, if at all. Aaron realized too late that meant he probably shouldn’t have said anything. Gavin was his brother though, his best man, and he was going to hear about Adrian sooner or later. They would be family too, technically. “So uh ... you know how Mila has a brother? Adrian? And everybody thought he was dead?” he started, looking a little sheepish about it. It was a pretty big secret to keep. But then he was also keeping the secret that their father was dead, but he didn’t want to think about Joseph right then. “Well, turns out he’s not.”
Gavin frowned softly as Aaron spoke. It had been months since Mila sent Aaron to the hospital but he remembered Aaron rambling about having been attacked a second time by someone who looked like Adrian Moretti. They had never spoken of it again so he'd chalked it up to confusion or some dirty trick played by the evil in the tunnels. "So it was Adrian who attacked you," he said slowly, trying to process that information and figure out what to do with it. He didn't remember much of what Aaron had said back then, only that Gavin had worried about having to find Adrian if he hurt Aaron again and the guy was supposed to be dead. He'd imagined some spectre, something uncanny like the thin man or the black eyed children. "Are you sure?"
It slipped Aaron’s mind sometimes that Adrian had attacked him that first night, so much had happened between them since then. They’d gotten close under weird and unhappy circumstances, and Aaron considered him a brother already. He realized that might be hard to explain to Gavin. “Yeah, I’m sure, uh ... he’s living in the house with us,” he said, an apologetic note in his voice. This was the kind of thing he ordinarily would have told Gavin about, and he felt a little guilty that he hadn’t. Aaron had gained a lot of secrets in the past year or so. “I’ve known for a while. He was looking for Mila, and we’ve talked a lot since then. He’d been like, in hiding, but he’s back now. He just saw their parents for the first time the other day.”
The answers just raised more questions and Gavin was frowning as he wondered why Adrian had been hiding and why he'd attacked Aaron in the first place and why Aaron was okay with it now. Where did he even start his line of questioning? It seemed like a lot. "Aaron," he said quietly, his brows furrowing further. "Is he dangerous?" That seemed like the most pertinent question to start with, if Mila's brother was living in their house Gavin needed to be sure he wasn't a threat. "I think you're gonna have to start from the beginning here. What the hell has been going on?"
Ah shit. Many times in his life, Aaron had talked himself into a corner and he felt that familiar sense of regret for opening his mouth. He should’ve cleared this with Adrian, made sure the story for their families were straight ... but it wasn’t as if Gavin didn’t believe in the supernatural, given his experience, and Aaron was already keeping a big thing from him, so there was guilt in the mix too. He half-winced and moved to plop down in the chair again, since this might take a while longer. “He’s not dangerous,” he said first. “I mean, I’m sure he is to some people, but not to us.” Aaron sighed. “There’s a lot that I don’t know all the details of, but ... some monster out in Blackwater Woods killed his friends that night and hurt him too. He managed to get away, but there were some weird ... effects, on him. So he stayed gone, pretended to be dead, got some help ... he kept checking in on Mila. When she disappeared, he thought maybe I had something to do with it, so we had our little confrontation -- he didn’t know she’d already stabbed me. He was just trying to protect his sister. He turned up more after that, to me. I let him stay in my trailer for a while. He was actually the one who took Mila to the hospital from the tunnel. He found her. He’s been coming and going since then, but he decided recently to like, come back to the world. But he’s not dangerous, he’s himself and he loves Mila. We’re helping him out like we’d help you or Caden, you know?”
Gavin listened intently and he had a feeling Aaron was keeping some parts of the story from him but it wasn't any of his business how Aaron decided to protect himself and Mila, not really. He just felt a little tired because of course there was a monster out in Blackwater Woods. It wasn't exactly surprising to him, he'd been one of the people who'd questioned the official story that Cruz Acosta went crazy and killed all his friends and brother. They'd been reckless and stupid to go so far out in those woods and something had gotten them, just as he thought. Unsure what to do with this information he didn't push or pry for more, just shook his head softly as he processed it. "Mila must be happy," he finally settled for. "It's good to get our people back." He should know and he hadn't had to wait for five years to get his kids back, he couldn't even imagine how it would feel to be so certain they were dead only for them to reappear. With changes. "I hope you're right, that he's not a danger to you. We've had enough tragedy already."
Aaron was relieved that Gavin didn’t ask for a bunch of details, and he gave a smile and a nod. Mila was happy, and it was definitely an incredible feeling, having someone returned who you thought you’d lost for good. He’d felt it with Mila, but Gavin knew it even more intimately, with both of his kids. “Yeah, I know,” he said with some sincere empathy. “But it’s been months now since he came back, I know we’re safe with him. He just acts like a regular guy.” If he didn’t feel like he knew they were safe, he would actually have a problem with Adrian being around his pregnant fiancee. But Adrian’s issues were controlled, and Aaron had come to care about him like family too. “I know it might be a little weird, but I wanna invite him out with us, bachelor party and all. He’ll be my brother. I dunno if he’ll come, being so public and all, but I want to ask anyway.”
Gavin nodded his understanding and hoped it wouldn't get weird - or supernatural - to have Adrian with them. "It's your wedding, Aaron," he said with a faint smile. "You're in charge of the guest list here. Just let me know who you want in your party and I'll make sure they show up." He wasn't so sure Adrian Moretti would be thrilled to go to a bachelor party given his history, but there was no way this group was going camping so that might help. No spooky woods, no haunted houses, just a good old strip club and a whole lot of booze. Of course he had to consider that Caden might have some ideas up his sleeve but it was ultimately Gavin's call and he really did not need something elaborate and crazy happening, they'd had enough of that too.
That made Aaron grin happily again. He so rarely got to be in charge of anything, especially something being planned on his behalf. He stood up again and moved in to give his brother a quick but firm hug. “Thanks man,” he said as he pulled back, still smiling. “I’ll get a list for you. Probably won’t be many, I don’t need anything big or nothin’. I just wanna have a good time, y’know? So I appreciate it.” There was going to be a lot to appreciate from a lot of people to pull this together, but it truly meant a lot to him that Gavin had agreed to be his best man. And now Aaron could talk openly about Adrian, and that was a relief just by itself. It had just been a good conversation all around. Probably time to quit while they were ahead. “You want me up front, or doing inventory?”
"Take care of the bar for a bit," Gavin told him, not minding the hugs. Aaron looked happy, that was all that really mattered and he had promised Mila to make sure of that. "And ask Miles to come talk to me." He was already planning on looking up what being best man entailed once he had some time to himself because he really didn't know much beyond what he'd seen in movies and TV shows and those tended to only show bits and pieces. He was sure Aaron would be pretty chill about it all but that didn't mean he didn't want to do it right. "Inventory can wait a couple of hours."
“Okay, will do,” Aaron said, sounding chipper. He liked working the bar and refilling drinks more than counting shit anyway, so that worked for him. He turned to head for the door to Gavin’s office, feeling like everything had gone better than he could’ve hoped for. He was very happy that Gavin had said yes, because he really didn’t think it would have gone as smoothly with Caden, who would’ve been next on the list. “I’ll send him back. Holler if you need me.” He left the office door open for Miles after he’d stepped out, feeling downright perky and ready to get to work.