The girls were at the science museum with friends and Alice was at work, so it was just Trist and Gabe, sitting around in the same room and ignoring one another.

Sophie and Bee had asked Gabe if he wanted to go with them, and he’d almost said yes because it sounded like fun, but then he’d remembered the huge bruise on his arm. It drew attention. It was too hot to wear long sleeves and he didn’t think it was likely he’d be able to get through the day without someone asking about it.

Trist was doing… something. Gabe wasn’t sure. It sounded like he was alternating between reading a book and messing around on his phone. He definitely wasn’t drawing. Gabe knew what that sounded like.

Gabe was playing a game on his laptop, badly. They hadn’t spoken to one another in hours, and Gabe would have wondered if Trist even remembered he was still there except Gabe had been murmuring his frustrations at his laptop for a while now, so yeah… he knew.

Gabe pushed his laptop away after failing the same challenge for what felt like the tenth time in a row. “Are you any good at computer games?”

“Well, I don’t own a computer, so…”

“Oh.”

“What specifically?”

“It’s a jumping puzzle thing and it’s timed and I can’t do it. And then every time I mess it up, it makes me watch a thirty second unskippable cutscene before I can try again.”

Trist hung his head down over the side of the bed. “What kind of terrible hell game are you playing?”

“The rest of the game is fine, but I can’t progress unless I do this. And I can’t.”

Trist climbed down off the top bunk. “Well, the problem is that you’re playing with your laptop on your lap and with no mouse. Come on.”

Gabe picked up his laptop and followed Trist out of the room and across the hall. He lingered in the doorway when Trist went into the girls’ room.

“Come on,” Trist said.

“Are we allowed in there?”

Trist looked up from going through one of the drawers in a desk. “Yeah, they don’t give a shit. Here, I found a spare mouse we can use.”

“Okay, if you’re sure they won’t mind…” Gabe stepped into the room and sat down on a chair in front of the desk Trist pointed him to.

The girls’ room was nicer than theirs. They had separate beds and decorative cushions and a fluffy purple rug on the floor. There was a framed charcoal portrait above one of the beds. Though she looked younger and frailer in it, it was recognisably Bee.

“Did you draw that?” Gabe asked, nodding towards the framed picture.

Trist glanced over as he pulled up another chair. “Huh? Oh, yeah.”

“It’s good.”

“Thanks. I didn’t expect her to frame it. Guess she liked it.”

“Are you sure it’s okay for us to be in here?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. I actually shared this room with them for the first like… three weeks I was here.”

“Wow. How did that work?”

“They used to have the bunk beds in here and our room was a study. I slept with them in here on a camping mattress until we got everything moved around and found some cheap beds. The desk was from the study, which is why there’s random computer mice and shit in the drawers.”

“What was it like, sharing a room with them?”

Trist shrugged and leant into Gabe’s personal space to plug in the mouse. “You’ve probably figured that none of us ended up here for good reasons, so I was kind of moody. Bee was still really sick at the time, though, so that helped keep me from dwelling too much on my own bullshit.”

“Sounds like it was a rough period for all of you.”

“Yeah, it was a bit. Bee’s immune system is generally pretty weak and she was doing bad in general around that time, so it just totally gave out and she got this really bad chest infection that she just couldn’t shake. She’d wake up in the middle of the night coughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. She was always so apologetic about waking us up, but honestly it probably helped me deal with my own shit. I mean, I wasn’t glad she was sick — that was scary — but I think it forced me to actually be a part of this family instead of pulling away. You know?”

“Yeah, I do, because it seems like I accidentally kinda replicated that formula.”

“Ha, that’s true.” Trist pulled the laptop over and began clicking through the annoying cut scene. “I guess the secret to cutting through my bullshit is just to get me to go into protective dad mode.”

“Da-mmh, yes,” Gabe said, narrowly avoiding calling Trist daddy. It had sounded funny in his head, but then he’d had flashbacks to the tsundere incident and abruptly realised that Trist would not appreciate that kind of humor.

Fortunately, Trist had started the jumping puzzle and he was so focused on it that he didn’t seem to have noticed Gabe’s awkward slip.

“You’re pretty good at that for someone who doesn’t own a computer,” Gabe said.

“Oh, well, I don’t own one now, but I played plenty of pc games with my brother growing up. We lived in this huge apartment building in the city and there wasn’t really anywhere to play outside, so we played a lot of video games.”

“Do you miss your brother?”

Trist overshot one of the jumps and swore as the challenge reset. “I miss him in the same way you miss dead people.”

“...Is he dead?”

“No, just an asshole.” Trist clicked through the cutscene again. 

“What happened?”

Trist shook his head and leant in as the timer started once more. “I don’t want to go into it.”

“I’m sorry. I know it sucks not to be able to be with your family, even if they’re not the best.”

“Nah, I am with my family.” Trist was taking a slower, more methodical approach this time, carefully lining up each jump. “Maybe not all of them are actually related to me, but I don’t think that matters. And hey, Bee is, and I’ve been closer to her than my own brother for years now. My dad and my brother let me down in a big way, and I hate them for it, but I’m glad it happened because now I’m here.”

“I never would have taken you for such a positive thinker.”

Trist shot Gabe another one of those butterfly inducing smiles. “I guess I’m not always, but I try to be grateful for what I have.”

“I— yeah. I try to be, too.”

“Doing it is hard. Sometimes even wanting to do it is hard.” Trist gave the space bar a final firm tap as he made the last jump, then let out a cry of victory and threw his hands in the air. “And that was hard too, but I fucking did it!”

“My hero.”

Trist shot Gabe a look out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t say anything. After pushing the laptop back over in front of Gabe, he stayed sitting where he was.

So Gabe kept playing, and they kept talking, and every now and then when Gabe got frustrated with a challenge, Trist would step in to help him out again. It was a shit game, honestly, which only became more apparent the more they played, but Gabe was worried if he suggested they do something else, it might bring an early end to their bonding time.

They were still playing when the girls got home, and only stopped when Sophie insisted they help her put together the triceratops skeleton model kit she’d bought at the museum gift shop.