Chapter Text
Erik is eight when he meets Simon.
A pair of dark curious eyes watching him through the fence at the bottom of their garden.
Simon is nine, and he is a whole year older — and six months, Simon smugly reminds him — and Erik thinks that it’s incredibly cool that an older boy wants to be friends with him. Until Simon turns ten that summer and — because of birthday maths Erik doesn’t really understand — he’s starting middle school.
Simon is two years ahead not one and Erik is still only eight and in year 2 not year 3 and now he just feels strangely left behind.
Two years seems like forever.
Erik wonders if Simon will find cooler, older friends at school and forget about the summer they spent playing in his garden.
But Simon doesn’t, he’s still there after school — when his mum lets him — and on the weekend’s where he’s not busy and Erik beams and forgets he ever worried.
His parents aren’t exactly on the same page as Erik when it comes to Simon.
They don’t like him — Erik isn’t stupid — but they do love Erik, and Simon living in the town at the bottom of the hill makes him a very convenient friend. Simon comes with other friends though whom his parents are even less pleased about, but they won’t let him go to school, so really, Erik thinks, they only have themselves to blame. The tutor that comes by daily tells them that socialising is important for growing children, and so they, reluctantly, let Ayub and Rosh hang around occasionally as well.
Erik likes Rosh the best.
She climbs trees with him and she’s never backed out of a dare, not like Ayub who always says he’s game but never wants to do the really fun ones. Or Simon, who knows better than to ever accept a dare from Erik.
Simon is his best friend though and it’s different to liking Rosh the best, somehow.
Rosh is great fun to play ball with or go tearing around the garden, but Erik can sit with Simon for hours and do nothing and Rosh has seen him fall out of a tree and break his arm, but Simon’s the one who saw him cry when they finally made it up to the house to get his mother.
Rosh knows that he had a brother.
But Simon’s the one that Erik shows his little frog collection to, buried at the back of his wardrobe where his mother won’t find it. The last birthday card he got, a tangled knot of cord that Erik swears was a bracelet once, a worn and tattered photograph that’s so faded it’s barely recognisable. Little china figurines and plastic toys and stickers.
All around a cheap snowglobe that used to sit on his brother’s desk.
Simon looks at it solemnly for a whole minute and he keeps his hands very carefully in his lap. Simon loves to touch and fiddle, Erik knows all his jumper ends are chewed and knotted and his mum is constantly telling him off for sticky fingers on their furniture.
“Why so many frogs?” He asks eventually.
Erik shrugs, as if it doesn’t matter too much. “That’s all I managed to get from his room.”
Simon frowns. “What happened to it?”
“Mum and dad put it away in boxes.”
Simon’s frown gets even deeper but he doesn’t say anything else and the silence sort of hurts and Erik starts to feel like maybe that was the wrong answer.
“It looked lonely,” he says, tracing a finger over the plastic. “It used to sit with other things he liked, but they were already gone. I didn’t want it to be lonely.”
Simon doesn’t say anything and when Erik turns to look at him he’s met with the warm fabric of Simon’s old hoodie and Simon’s arms wrapped around his shoulders.
“I’ll make sure you’re not lonely,” he mumbles into Eriks’ hair, and, the next time he visits, Simon presses a little wooden frog into Erik’s hand.
“For Wille,” he says.
Simon is twelve when Rosh storms into his house and tells him that Erik tried to kiss her.
He can’t really tell whether she’s angry or not so he waits.
Rosh doesn’t seem to know what to do either, and in the end, she just huffs and throws herself on his bed.
“I thought we were friends,” she says, annoyed and — Simon can see now — a little hurt. “He’s ten.”
“He’s almost eleven,” Simon replies reflexively.
Rosh is the worst for teasing Erik for being the baby and Simon had never stopped correcting her and she had never stopped pointing it out. Once, a year or so ago, the teasing had bubbled into actual fighting; Erik had learned that Rosh had a mean right hook and Rosh had learned that Erik did not abide by the playground rules of not hitting girls.
Strangely the fact that Erik had hit her back had seemed to pacify her a little and Simon is convinced he’ll never understand her.
She huffs again. “But… we’re friends,” she repeats. “You don’t want to kiss me?” She sits bolt upright. “Do you?” Rosh looks horrified.
Simon considers it for a second.
Rosh is pretty and she is a girl and that really seems to be the only two requirements that the other boys he knows have.
“Simon.” Rosh is staring at him and looking worried.
Simon thinks it’s probably a good job he doesn’t want to kiss her or that might be a little offensive. “No,” he says. “I don’t think I really want to kiss anyone.”
Rosh lays back down. “I do,” she says, eyes closed and far away. “I want to kiss Princess Leia, or, like, Black Widow, you know?”
Simon snorts. “They’re not real people.”
“So? Real people suck.”
Simon props himself up on his elbows and looks at her. “They’re girls,” he says slowly, because they are and he was too busy thinking about his two best friends kissing each other to really register what Rosh had said properly. “You can’t kiss girls.”
“Why not?” Rosh doesn’t bother opening her eyes; she just frowns up at his ceiling. “Girls are awesome.”
Simon doesn’t have an answer.
She cracks one eye and raises her eyebrow.
“Well…” He thinks and frowns. “I’m supposed to kiss girls, not you.”
“Do you want to?”
Simon shakes his head
“Do you want to kiss boys?”
Simon hasn’t ever really thought about it, he lets himself flop back onto the bed and opens his mouth to answer. Then closes it again.
Ayub’s face crosses his mind, round and happy, scraggly dark hair loose around his face and he doesn’t feel too much different about him than he does Rosh. He wouldn’t mind kissing either of them, but want is a bit of a stretch.
Then Erik’s face floats into view all bright eyed and smirking.
“Maybe?” He says slowly. “I don’t know.”
Rosh shrugs and the bed shakes a little. “You wanna kiss boys and I wanna kiss girls. I guess it all balances out.”
Simon’s not sure it works that way, but Rosh’s maths — and conviction — is hard to argue with. “Are you mad at Erik?” He asks instead.
Rosh and Erik being mad at each other is such a nightmare for him, they make him carry messages back and forth and Rosh won’t go to Erik’s house and Erik refuses to meet them in the park and both of them want him to choose.
Simon is Rosh’s best friend and Simon is Erik’s best friend and Simon doesn’t see why he can’t have two, but they both say it doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes he thinks that, really, Ayub is best friend.
Ayub plays video games with him and doesn’t kiss any of them.
“No,” she sighs. “Not really, I just… thought we were friends.”
Simon frowns. “You keep saying that, I don’t get it.”
Rosh sits up. “Friends don’t kiss their friends Simon,” she says as if this is obvious. “Because then you can’t be friends anymore.”
“Oh,” Simon says quietly and thinks about Erik. “Right,” he says a little distantly and thinks about kissing boys again.
He probably shouldn’t kiss boys.
He definitely shouldn’t kiss Erik.
Simon is thirteen when he does it anyway.
Erik’s just a few weeks shy of his twelfth birthday when Simon kisses him.
He’s not really sure what to do with it and Erik is suddenly reminded of a moment, maybe a year or so ago now, when Rosh stared at him, wide eyed, then pushed him away, slapped her hand over her mouth and stalked angrily out of his house.
He thinks he understands her a little better now.
It’s unexpected, and not entirely welcome, and he doesn’t want to upset Simon, but he also doesn’t really want to be kissing him either. Still, it seems rude to push him away, Erik remembers how terrible he felt when Rosh did that to him, embarrassed shame flooding his stomach.
He doesn’t want Simon to feel like that either.
So he stands there and lets Simon kiss him.
He and Rosh are fine now, mostly.
She’d stopped looking at him warily and within a week they were back to teasing Ayub for not being able to swing into the lowest branch of the tree in the garden before begrudgingly hauling him up after them. The strange bubbly feeling in his stomach slowly disappeared and by the end of that summer Erik couldn’t even remember why he’d wanted to kiss her in the first place.
So he knows he and Simon will be fine too, especially because Erik isn’t going to storm off or ignore him for three days like Rosh did.
“We’re friends,” he says firmly when Simon leans back, remembering what Rosh had said when she’d finally started talking to him again. “And I don’t like boys like that.”
He’d thought about it a lot, when Rosh had confidently stated it to his face like the fact he was a boy was some sort of failing on his part. He’d considered Ayub and Simon and Rosh and all the people on the TV shows his parents occasionally let him watch.
Simon was the best person he knew, he wanted him around all the time.
But Rosh was the one he’d wanted to kiss.
“Oh,” Simon says, stepping back. “Hmmm.” He looks at his feet awkwardly for a moment. “I think I do.”
Erik squeezes his shoulder and nods solemnly. “That’s okay.”
“But… I don’t think I like you like that,” Simon blurts, flushes pink and then looks horrified. “I’m sorry!”
Erik grins. “That’s okay too!” He wraps his arms around Simon’s shoulders. “We’re friends.”
Simon crumples under his hand. “Rosh said you can’t be friends if you’ve kissed,” he mumbles.
Erik frowns. “Why did you kiss me then?” He steps back. “Do you not want to be friends anymore?”
This seems like a stupid way to tell someone that.
“No!” Simon finally looks up and Erik’s alarmed to see his eyes all watery and red. “You’re my best friend. I… I just, I thought… you’re my favourite person and I want to do everything with you. So I thought maybe…”
Simon trails off, but it’s clear what he means and Erik can sort of see his point; he wants to do everything with Simon too and kissing him wasn’t bad.
It just wasn’t kissing Rosh.
“Well, Rosh is stupid, my parents are friends and they kiss all the time.”
Simon nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“And my brother kissed his friend. So.” Erik shrugs.
He doesn’t ever talk about Wille, but this seems important and it’s one of his last memories of his brother, standing in the garden looking so happy as Nils pulled him closer.
Erik was almost eight, he remembers because he’d had a birthday party, that’s why Nils had been there, Erik was allowed one friend over when Wille had his and Wille was allowed the same.
Wille always chose Nils.
Their parents liked Nils, he lived a little far away and they didn’t get to see him very often but Nils went to the same school as Wille and Erik understood that that was very important for some reason.
His birthday party was early that year, they were going on holiday and his mother wanted the party done and over before and not after. Erik never really understood why Wille didn’t come with them in the end, mum said he had to study and Wille had just smiled at him and hugged him when Erik had stomped a foot and told him that was stupid.
I’m sorry little brother, I love you.
All Erik knows is that, when they come back, Wille is gone and those are the last words he ever said and, occasionally, very late at night, Erik wonders if Wille knew.
He couldn’t have predicted a car crashing, surely, Erik knows this.
Still
He wonders.