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Etho had never been any good at sitting still.
Looking back, it had made him a nuisance of a child. Picking at his clothes, leaning backwards in his chair, flapping his hands hard enough to get pain in his wrists despite his mother’s warnings not to. His chest would get fluttery sometimes, his limbs feather-light and unwieldy in a strange concoction he’d later recognise as anxiousness, and he’d softly hum to himself and shut his eyes to make the feeling go away, his fingers rubbing against each other or gently threading through his hair.
Large hands would close around his own before he even realised what he was doing, and a disapproving voice would tell him again for the hundredth time, “Stop that. Can’t you see that you’re embarrassing us all?”
His breath tight, it would take Etho a moment to properly process the words.
In the beginning, he’d tried to squirm away. By the time he was four, he understood there was no point. Instead, he’d open his eyes and look away, obediently going still.
If it was his father who’d caught him and he hadn’t stopped immediately, he’d brace for the smack over his knuckles, bright and startling, and try not to flinch and earn another. If it were his mother, he’d be able to feel her angry stare against his lightly freckled cheek, and she’d push his hands into his pockets and tell him to keep them there, lest someone see him and think he was a fool.
Etho didn’t know why the simple act of calming down was shameful. It felt like such a natural thing. It felt good, rare in a world so big and overwhelming. Maybe it was because none of the other kids calmed themselves down like he did. Maybe it was because his parents didn’t like the stares that followed them when he hummed and touched his face at the supermarket, the white lights making his stomach hurt. Either way, he did what he was told. Etho didn’t understand a lot about how the world worked, but he did understand pain. He did what he could to avoid it.
He was a uniquely disobedient child, he’d been told. Reprimands were the only way that he could learn.
And learn, he did.
He taught himself to recognise the urge when it came; learned to bury it deep, deep down or redirect it onto something less likely to be caught. When he was around other people, he followed his mom’s instructions and buried his hands in his pockets, even when she wasn’t there, and when he was on his own, he gave in to his shameful impulses in shorter, subtler ways, easier to hide if someone found him breaking his parents’ rules.
Flapping hands became little flexes of his toes. Rocking became sharp nails pressed into his palms. When he was overwhelmed, he shoved the feeling down and went completely still, and when he was excited… well, those moments slowly disappeared.
Etho trained himself to be more normal. It was important, he felt. Everyone else seemed to be good at it already.
It didn’t matter that the pressure felt suffocating, or that his hands sometimes shook in anticipation of a reprimand that never came. It didn’t matter that it sometimes felt like everyone was watching him, scrutinising his every movement with their eyes, or that the fluttery feeling in his chest became a constant, grating presence at the edges of his vision until he snapped in private and found himself tearing at his skin.
It didn’t matter. His parents were trying to teach him the rules of the world, and the least he could do was listen.
But of course, Etho was a uniquely disobedient child. It was a wonder that he lasted as long as he did.
Nineteen years, and then he fled.
When Etho ran away from home with nothing but the clothes on his back and a wad of saved-up cash in his bag, the first thing he did was find a big, dark green jacket at the back of a thrift store on the side of the road. It sat heavily on his thin shoulders, comforting in a way that none of the clothes his parents let him wear could manage, and the pockets were deep, able to hide his slouched frame and fidgeting hands far better than the hoodie he’d taken with him. The shop was selling handmade fabric masks at the front counter, and he grabbed one, too. Anything to hide from the hundreds of eyes he was slowly being crushed by.
When he put the purchases on outside, it was like the strings holding him up had finally snapped. The mask and jacket were an instant comfort, hiding him from the outside world and concealing every quirk and shameful habit he’d never wanted to kick. In the deep pockets, Etho hid pieces of string and trash he found, turning them over in his hands and feeling their texture when his composure began to break. Behind the mask, he hid the faces people accused him of making, and the blank expression he often wore when he was exhausted was free to become a constant. People could look, people could stare, but hidden away beneath the heavy fabrics he donned that night, Etho felt safe for the first time in forever, knowing that, unless he wanted them to, nobody would ever properly see him again.
No one was watching him except himself.
The loneliness nearly killed him, looking back on it. With no one looking, it was far too easy to imagine a world where he slowly faded away. Far too easy to find a bridge to die under, or a street corner to starve on. With nobody keeping him alive, it had to become a choice.
Sometimes, he scared himself.
But he managed.
So, Etho hid. Through the mask, no one could see him bite his lip when the world got strange and overwhelming. Behind the jacket, no one could tell that he was fidgeting with a coin. And with no home to go back to, the streets were anonymous, letting him mix into the crowds and imagine, just for a moment, that what he was doing was just as normal as everybody else.
Those few months, Etho tasted the first true lick of safety in his life.
Then his scrappy car broke down and brought him to a family of angels, and he was forced out of hiding once again.
“When are you going to show me your face?” Cleo asked early on in their relationship, and Etho tensed a little beside her, his heart unexpectedly leaping to his throat.
He’d only been on his own for a few months by then, sleeping rough and living on what little cash he had left. She didn’t know that, of course. They barely knew each other. But he hadn’t realised how attached he’d gotten to the life he’d built behind that mask — even the thought of taking it off in front of someone already made him sweat.
“Um,” Etho said, his throat tightening around his words. “I hadn’t… I mean—”
“I promise I won’t mind if you’re ugly,” Cleo continued in what should have been a joke, but Etho’s stomach lurched.
He hadn’t even thought about that. What they would think of him, whether they already had an idea of what he’d look like…
His fear must have shown in his eyes, because Cleo chuckled and gave him a soft look.
“It’s a joke, Etho. It’s fine,” they said casually. “I’m just saying… You know. It would be nice to be able to kiss you somewhere else besides your cheek.”
Oh.
Etho had gone red and managed a stupid joke, and the conversation had moved on to other things under Cleo’s ever-easy guidance. She never asked again, but he thought about it every night as he curled up to sleep.
Cleo wanted to see him. Wanted him.
Three weeks later, Etho took his mask off for her, and she told him he was beautiful. He blushed and looped the elastic back around his ears, his skin brushing fresh air for only a few seconds before embarrassment burned, but it was already done. She’d seen him, though at least he could control it.
It felt electric.
That was one of the many things Cleo was good at: getting Etho to do things he still didn’t think he was ready for. They were an addiction he couldn’t shake. He’d never had anyone like this before, and he’d be damned if he refused to heed their requests.
They were the first person he’d known in a long time who smiled when they saw him — all of him.
To be fair, he hadn’t known a lot of people.
And it was difficult not to feel watched again. Especially when Cleo was so… Cleo. Perfect, when Etho wasn’t. Every new thing Etho learned about her was a reminder of all the ways in which he’d failed to be normal. Their father was gentle with them; they didn’t have to fear him, weren’t a problem like Etho was for his parents. They laughed loudly and nobody got upset, and they didn’t hide or fidget like Etho did, giving him odd, amused looks whenever he forgot the rules he’d tried so hard to learn.
Cleo must have been doing something right that Etho just couldn’t see. She was confident, natural, and Etho wasn’t.
It only got more and more obvious the longer they were together.
“You can relax around me. You know that, right?” Cleo asked once, softly, tracing shapes on Etho’s palm after they’d caught him clawing the wrongness out of his skin in the bathroom of their first apartment together. Their voice was worried, their eyes gentle and sad. “You seem so tense…”
Etho swallowed and stared pointedly elsewhere.
“I’m fine,” he replied unconvincingly. The words were there, but little else.
He could try for her. He could let his walls down further than he’d ever done before. She told him he was safe, told him that she loved him. But the shame was so deep-rooted that his fingers refused to even try to thread gently through his hair when they needed to, or rub against each other in that pattern he’d been born knowing, and he couldn’t make himself hum loud enough to soothe his soul, even when no one else was listening.
Above all, he could never tell her just how desperately he wanted to.
He wasn’t a boy anymore. If he forgot that fact, Cleo would soon realise what Etho’s parents had tried so hard to mask: that there had been something deeply, terribly wrong with him since before he could remember, and he was impossible to change.
What they’d caught him doing was the only way that he could let the anxious creature that writhed within him out: the scratching, the shutdowns, the silent shattering when he thought he was alone. It was ugly, like everything about him. An ugly, messy thing he did in private to keep himself together.
That was his parents’ one bitter success. They’d managed to beat the child out of him like they’d wanted to, and in turn, they’d made him into an awful thing.
Maybe he’d always been an awful thing.
But he didn’t tell Cleo that. Instead, he let them hold him for a while longer until their worry seemed to ease, then got up to find a shirt to cover the red-raw scratch marks he hadn’t wanted her to see.
He got better at hiding from them after that. They got better at finding him, but they never understood.
On their wedding day, Etho fidgeted with the button on his suit so anxiously that it fell off on the way to the reception, and his stomach dropped with it, his muscles tensing in anticipation of a reprimand. Cleo glanced over at him in the back of their mom’s car, and he tried to hide the evidence in the closed palm of his hand.
Still, she’d already seen.
His mask discarded at her request, Etho gave her a guilty look, and Cleo smiled back affectionately, though Etho would never be able to figure out what about the sight of him had seemed endearing at the time.
When they noticed him fiddling with the empty button hole hours later, they offered their hand for him to hold instead, and he didn’t know how to tell them that it wasn’t what he needed.
It didn’t help that he didn’t know what he needed, either.
A breath, maybe. One full breath that didn’t feel like it was being squeezed out of him.
It was a horrible feeling to drown, gasping for air that wouldn’t come. When he was a boy, Etho fell off a pier into a lake his father was fishing in, and his lungs clawed their way up his throat and reached out into the thrashing water with desperate, spongy hands before a rough grip pulled him out and tossed his tiny body onto shore. He’d coughed and sputtered and clung to his father for the rest of the outing, soaked to the bone but thankful to be alive. It was nature’s mercy that such a wrathful lack of oxygen could only ever last three minutes.
Or so he’d thought.
Something had dragged Etho’s head back down beneath the water that night in his wedding suit, surrounded on every side by people wishing him prosperity. Cleo’s family was everywhere, their sweaty bodies pressing against each other as they moved, their smiles melting into one. Glasses clinked, people danced, alcohol filled the air with its nauseating scent, and—
And Etho’s hands found themselves shoved into his pockets, squeezing into fists to ward off the feeling welling in his chest — no longer a flutter, but an entire flock of fleeing birds, their wings beating in the deafening roar of a species trying to outrun extinction.
He didn’t want this, he realised as Cleo looped her arm around his like they were an inseparable pair.
Etho didn’t want this.
“Everything okay?” Cleo asked, her voice sounding too far away to be normal.
The air was thick and cloying, time sticking to his skin and dribbling between his fingers like a raw egg crushed in an accidental fist. He was watching from outside his body, but the world pressed in from every direction, a claustrophobic nightmare, and his white shirt felt three sizes too small.
No, Etho wanted to say, tenser than ever, his heart static in his stomach. No, this feels wrong. Everything about this feels wrong.
“Yup,” he replied instead, digging his nails into his palms and banishing the pain from his eyes. “I’m fine.”
It was a lie, but the only response he knew how to give.
He could feel Cleo hesitate, their gaze lingering just a little too close, but they let it go. They always did. That was the problem, really. They rarely ever asked a second time.
So, Etho followed her to the next table of guests, watching his body go through the motions of shuffling between chairs, and prayed with every passing second for the night to end.
It did, eventually.
And then came life. Domesticity. Two kids and a family home, and the slowly building weight of layers upon layers of sloshing water stretched so far overhead that it nearly blocked out the sun.
Etho found it easy enough to pretend it wasn’t happening.
He focused on the good moments; on the short gasps of fresh air where the waves lifted his head above water and made him feel like it could all work out. Etho would sit on the couch after a long day of work, and beside him, Cleo would absently braid and unbraid his silver hair, quietly recounting a conversation she’d had with a coworker to fill the silence without asking him to respond. She’d wake him up in the mornings with breakfast already made, and he’d spend his sleepless, pacing nights doing all the tasks she didn’t want to do. They bought a family home in their second year, and Cleo filled it with things, and Etho put his hands to good use with the renovations, and everything seemed… survivable.
If you squinted, it was like they could have been good for each other.
Like Etho could handle domesticity.
Almost.
Scar was born in the early winter — loud, red-faced, perfect. Cleo laughed, cried, kissed his soft head. Etho held his son in the hospital room and nearly dropped him for the first time, his shaking hands like jelly trying to support a life.
He looked down into a mirror image of his wife’s green eyes, held in a new, fragile soul of his own making, and felt something crack inside of him so suddenly it was almost painful.
Love. It had to be love.
But underneath it, terror.
Because in Etho’s care, all Scar did was scream.
“I can’t—” Etho breathed one night, his chest heaving with panicked half-sobs as he paced the nursery floor and tore at his unwashed hair. “He won’t— Can’t get him to stop, Cleo, please—”
He’d read all the books, watched the DVDs Cleo had given him, tried all the tricks. It was late, he hadn’t slept through the night in forever, and he could feel every inch of his skin as if it wasn’t his own, crawling over his flesh like hundreds of skittering bugs as Scar wailed with no sign of stopping.
He wanted so badly to get this right, and he was failing.
“He hates me,” Etho choked out, the heels of his palms pressing against his ears to block out the shrill noise coming from the crib. “He hates me, he— God, Cleo, I’ve fucked it up already—”
“Don’t be silly,” Cleo dismissed easily. They lifted the crying infant up into their steady arms and swayed with him. “He’s just tired, love. So are we.”
Tired was a tame word for the horrors living under Etho’s skin.
Scar’s wailing continued despite Cleo’s ministrations, piercing through what little infrastructure Etho had erected to keep himself together. He didn’t know how much longer he could stand it.
His strides got longer, and he paced, and paced, and paced, fighting off the terrible sensation building within him with everything he had. His scalp burned as his fingers twisted in his hair, and his eyes squeezed shut, every breath coming out loud and pained.
He didn’t even realise Scar was calming down in Cleo’s arms until the silence fell and his own hysterics were the only sounds in the room.
“There we go,” Cleo cooed in relief, but somehow, Etho still didn’t feel any better.
In fact, the panic in his chest was getting worse.
“All you needed was some sleep,” Cleo continued fondly, the exhaustion in their voice softened by affection. Etho could barely hear them, could barely process what they were doing. And if Cleo had noticed him unravelling, she was focusing on the boy instead. “Here we are, petal,” they said as they lowered him into the crib. “Sweet dreams.”
Etho tried to force a sound out as he beat a path into the rug beneath his feet, but his skin crawled, and his throat closed up.
Something was wrong. Something was happening to him, worse than it had been in a very long time, and all he could do was pace and claw, trying to keep himself together in the face of what he feared might be approaching.
It had happened before: moments when he couldn’t control himself at all, couldn’t obey the rules. He had a wonky finger from the last time it had happened, when a policeman’s hands had wrapped around his own with a punishing grip in an attempt to keep them from covering his ears. But it had been years since that. He’d been so good, so normal—
Etho could hear himself whimpering, a low, self-soothing hum escaping his throat as he paced, and he knew he was fighting a losing battle.
He’d been good. But this new world was so loud and big, and as hard as he tried, Etho was already doing everything wrong. Scar hated him like no one else the boy had ever met, and somehow, as always, Cleo still knew exactly what she was doing.
It was so loud.
It was so loud.
“You can calm down now, Etho. He’s asleep,” came Cleo’s tired voice from the crib, muffled like they were underwater. A few seconds passed, thunderous in Etho’s head but almost certainly silent in his wife’s, until Etho heard Cleo’s steps on the rug as she turned to look at him. “…Etho?”
Etho frantically shook his head, his eyes still squeezed shut. He didn’t want her eyes on him like this. He couldn’t stop it. He needed to be alone.
“Is something wrong?” Cleo cautiously asked.
He shook his head harder. No, nothing was wrong, nothing was ever wrong. Etho was being good. He was following the rules. He didn’t want to get hurt.
But the humming got louder, and he felt his hands leave his hair to cover his ears again, tears pricking at his eyes. Etho’s chest felt like it was splitting open, every sound and sensation overwhelming, and an awful sense of failure drew a sob straight from the furthest depths of his throat.
He felt like he was in free fall. So, so small compared to the fate hurtling towards him.
Cleo sighed, the ruffling of fabric telling him they were coming over. Their touch was jarringly cool when it landed on his shoulder, and he jerked away from it, humming louder to combat the hideous phantom bugs that flocked towards the site. It was a wonder that Scar hadn’t woken up again with how loud the sound seemed in Etho’s head.
“I—” he managed to choke out between breaths, but nothing more.
“Etho.”
“I can’t—”
“Come here.”
The words were kind, but Cleo’s voice was short with impatience.
Etho did as he was told. He let Cleo draw him into her arms despite his shaking body screaming at him not to, his fingers leaving his ears and digging into his forearms instead, and the tears came faster despite the hug being meant for comfort.
“I’m sorry,” he admitted as he cried into their shoulder. For failing, for breaking the rules, for not being able to do the simplest thing for their son without having a fit.
“It’s fine,” Cleo replied flatly, but something told him it really wasn’t.
They pulled away and gently turned Etho around to face the door, every touch like a wildfire on his skin. One hand on his elbow, the other at his waist, Cleo guided him towards the door. Etho felt like a little kid, coaxed into moving after taking a painful fall.
Except he was still humming, still clawing, his skin still aflame. The overwhelm was dialled up to one hundred with Cleo so close, and he was a grown man shaking apart, his forearms stinging beneath his white-knuckled nails.
“Come on, come to bed,” Cleo murmured, and Etho desperately wanted to refuse. He needed to be alone, needed to breathe, needed the silence that only solitude provided so the storm inside of him could pass.
But Etho wasn’t that little kid. He’d brought this onto himself. And after a long history of “I’m fine, Cleo, I just need a second”s, he could tell she wasn’t offering anymore.
That night, Cleo sat with him on the edge of their bed into the early hours of the morning and rubbed his back with a tight jaw as he fell apart. His doubts spilled out, rambling and incoherent, and his nails raked over his skin and tore at his hair. Cleo told him it would be okay, murmured stiff promises with a small fraction of the gentleness she’d shown to their newborn just minutes ago, and he didn’t have the wherewithal to shake his head and tell her she didn’t understand.
It wasn’t peace that eventually led him to sleep, but a bone-deep exhaustion that his mind couldn’t physically fight. He sagged into his wife’s warm hold, the energy drained out of him, and Cleo paused for a moment too long before smoothing their hands down his arms and laying him down to rest.
When the baby monitor woke them both up an hour later, Etho stayed under the covers until Cleo gave in and rose.
It was better for them both if she handled the boy, he understood that night. He ruined everything he touched, even himself. And Cleo was so good at everything on their own.
Etho would only ever get in the way.
In the morning, Cleo didn’t ask him to talk about what had happened.
Truthfully, she didn’t get the chance.
Humiliation coursed through Etho’s veins the moment he blinked himself awake, sobered by a forced night’s sleep. Breakfast was ready on the counter, the stroller was absent from the front room, and his mask was hanging by the door, a welcome safety in its shameful embrace. Etho slipped out to work before Cleo could return from their morning walk, and when he got home late at night, he climbed into bed without a word, the darkness obscuring the faint scratch marks they both knew still lingered on his skin.
Cleo never brought up what they’d witnessed that night again, but Etho could see in their eyes that she never forgot about it.
The next morning, she brushed him off when he tried to help her unfold the stroller, then again when he went to take Scar from her as she tried to juggle making breakfast. And when he offered to take the boy to the park after work, Cleo hesitated before saying yes.
Overnight, he watched their respect for him disintegrate, replaced with uncertainty in the smallest moments. Something changed between them that night that Etho could never take back, and cracked even further when he got home that next evening. He was a ticking time bomb, and she didn’t know when to trust him anymore.
That was what happened when you broke the rules, Etho learned. You lost the people who’d thought they loved you.
His parents had been right.
Months passed, then years, and Etho spent every second trying to reverse what he’d done.
Scar grew up, and Etho learned to hold him properly. He learned what the boy’s different cries meant and when to slip away, learned to run before something awful happened to grow the cracks between the three of them even further.
He tried to be good. He tried to be helpful. He tried to let that night be the only time his family saw him fall apart, and above all, he tried so desperately to be the kind of father he knew Scar deserved.
When Scar was four, Etho took him and Cleo to Disneyland with money they didn’t have. The way the boy had smiled, his eyes wide with wonder as he’d run down Main Street after a character in costume… It had made the birds in Etho’s chest worth it. It had made everything worth it, even the awful cocktail of crowds and overlapping noise that made his skin crawl and his focus start to slip. He plastered on a grin as Scar took his hand and led him through the masses, listened to every excited ramble and hoisted the boy high up on his shoulders when the sun lowered in the sky and Scar’s legs got tired.
“Dad?” Scar said drowsily, his little hands playing with one of Etho’s ears, eyes crossed to stare at the stubby fingers in front of his face.
“Mm?” Etho hummed, Cleo in a slow lockstep beside him.
They were heading home, the fireworks display still fresh in their minds. The edges of Etho’s hearing were full of static, and his thoughts buzzed with an exhaustion he’d been stubbornly resisting.
Scar thought for a moment, then said, “I love you, Daddy.”
Etho’s chest went tight so fast he thought he might drop the precious cargo on his back.
“…Love you too, bud,” he said after a delay, and Cleo squeezed his hand.
Maybe it could be alright. Maybe it would be fine, even if the overwhelm crept in with every passing second.
When he fell apart, he did it in private, locked in their hotel room as Cleo and Scar went out in search of dinner. Scratched at his arms in the dark, hummed to himself to drown out the buzz of electricity he was almost always aware of. He did it all in private, gathered the pieces before they returned, and pretended it was fine.
In their eyes, it would have been a perfect vacation — that was all that mattered.
For years, Etho kept it together, one way or another. He gathered Scar’s love up in his arms, wrung the cloth of Cleo’s trust out over a bucket with holes punched in the bottom, held everything he’d scraped together in the palms of his hands and prayed nothing would change.
Then came Bdubs.
He arrived in the winter after Disneyland, smaller somehow, different in a way that toppled Etho’s barely stable peace. Where Scar had screamed and demanded and filled every room with sound, Bdubs watched. He stared with wide, dark eyes that tracked people’s movements with newborn curiosity. The nurses joked that he was observant. Cleo laughed, tired but fond, and Etho smiled because that was what you did.
Inside, something rotten twisted tighter.
Because the quiet would only ever last so long.
Two children meant twice the noise, twice the unpredictability, twice the chances to do something unforgivable. There was no way Etho was going to be able to grit his teeth through it as he had for the last four years. He was already exhausted.
So, he adapted.
At least, he thought so. Later, he’d realise he was just running like he always did.
Etho took on more hours at work, made excuses and slipped away to crash on a foreign couch a mile out of town. He stayed up later and slept less. He learned the precise creak of every floorboard so he could move through the house without waking anyone, and he got used to sliding into bed to find the sheets empty, Cleo having fallen asleep in the nursery with the boys.
If he stayed away, Etho told himself, he wouldn’t be a problem. Loving the boys was easy, unlike how his parents had told him it would be. He didn’t run because he didn’t care, but because he cared enough to give Scar and Bdubs the life they deserved:
A life where he wasn’t there to fuck it up.
He ran to save himself, and he ran to save his boys.
But he forgot about Cleo.
She noticed quickly, of course. They always did. They asked him — gently at first, but then with growing frustration — why he was never really around anymore. Why she knew less about his day than she knew about her brothers’, why he was never willing to read to the boys or cook dinner when she threatened to fall asleep with a toddler on her hip.
“I can’t, Cleo, I—” he tried to explain, but she wouldn’t hear it.
“That’s just not enough,” they said, and Etho felt every bit of headway he’d made slip away from him, all at once.
As the boys grew, the house got louder. Toys beeped and sang, arguments blared, and cartoons echoed down the hallway. Etho’s pockets filled again — coins, loyalty cards, playthings taken from the kids — and his nails found his palms more often than not. He learned how to hide in plain sight, sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper and a breakfast gone cold, thumbing at his wedding ring and nodding at all the right moments to tell the kids to listen to their mother, and he never once let the storm clouds rolling within him show.
On the rare days when the universe gifted him enough energy to bear it, he took the boys out and about. To parks, to markets, to the local pool. Those few hours every month filled his heart to the brim and urged him to keep going, to seek two wild, ice-cream-smeared grins in every moment of every day.
“You’re the best dad ever,” Bdubs would declare as they bought drive-through takeout on the way home, and Etho would hate to prove him wrong.
When the outing was over, he’d crumble in the kitchen while the boys napped, until Cleo got back and the house sprang to loud, chaotic life again, all too quickly.
Every time, Etho told himself this would be the last. But those smiles were addictive, and he was far too willing to ruin himself for them.
And ruin himself he did.
The years passed, and Etho continued as a ghost in his own home. Fun in the briefest of moments. Safe in the way that unexploded bombs were safe if you never touched them, and absent in every aspect of the word.
Cleo stopped reaching for him in the small ways they used to. They stopped braiding his hair on the couch, stopped asking him to do things for the kids, stopped telling him to come home. Conversations turned practical, then sparse. Tolerance replaced partnership so slowly that Etho wasn’t sure when it happened, only that one day, he realised he couldn’t remember the last time they’d smiled together.
Thirteen years after their wedding, Cleo said his name across their empty bedroom with a careful steadiness that made his stomach drop.
“I want a divorce,” they told him solemnly.
Etho nodded.
He had known it was coming. He had always known.
He didn’t have it in him to feel much of anything at the time.
The separation was civil. Kind, even. Cleo cried — not for him but for all the years wasted. Etho didn’t. They agreed on schedules, on holidays, on how to make it easiest for the boys. Cleo wouldn’t have to fight for custody; Etho didn’t try to take it, and it was clear that no court would give it to him anyway.
They sat the boys down one night and explained what was happening, and Etho would never forget the look of loss in those four beautiful eyes he’d tried so hard never to hurt.
Scar took the news hard. He was ten years old and angry, and Etho silently accepted every insult the boy threw his way. It was nothing he hadn’t heard before in his own head, after all: you’re a monster; I hate you; I hope you die.
“He’s a bad dad,” Scar told a six-year-old Bdubs in front of him, and Etho swallowed back his grief.
He didn’t know when he’d grown apart from the boy. Maybe they’d never been that close since the start.
Bdubs was different, as he always was. Kinder, still holding out hope. Behind Scar’s back, he quietly told Etho that he still loved him, a promise whispered into his ear long past bedtime, little bare footsteps pattering on the living room floor by the couch where Etho slept, and the sound uprooted memories Etho had no right to cherish so dearly.
That was when Etho cried. Silently, a thin sheet pulled over his shoulders when he was sure the boy had slipped away.
He moved out eventually, his life packed into a few boxes in the back of his pickup and carted across town to a small, cheap apartment by the city. When he got there, the first thing he unpacked wasn’t his clothes or his toiletries. It was a single photograph: four smiles, red curls and silver hair, two sets of green eyes and a toddler with a toothy, sugar-fueled grin.
It was one of the only photos Etho had of himself without the mask. Even his eyes had shown his smile, so rarely genuine.
They looked like a real family behind the glass cover of that photo frame.
It was an awful feeling to look back on something that you knew you’d ruined since.
Once the photo was properly positioned on the entry table, Etho dug into his suitcase and pulled out the old, dark green jacket he’d bought so long ago, frayed at the cuffs but still heavy in his hands. He hung it by the door and stood there for a long time, breathing.
Alone again, the silence felt more like a punishment than something he’d been searching for all his life.
A year and eight months passed in that apartment without Etho noticing.
Time became viscous, slow and formless. The days blurred together, and Etho stopped trying to mark them at all. He showed up to the solicitor’s office when he needed to and slept late when he didn’t, watched the calendar on the wall count down the months of separation needed to legally action the divorce, and took on odd jobs that let him work from his computer at home. He woke when his body demanded it and slept when exhaustion ran him dry — sometimes at sunset, sometimes not until the birds heralded the coming morning.
His mask and coat hung at the door, unused. There was no one left to hide from and no reason to leave the house besides survival.
It would be a lie to say that Etho wasn’t relieved. He hadn’t known how much longer he’d be able to keep going before Cleo stepped in. But it often felt like he’d traded one kind of Hell for another, and he crashed hard and fast when the shock wore off.
Existing was harder on his own. Everything was.
Etho didn’t know when he stopped taking care of himself, but it happened somewhere along the way, and with every passing day, it became more and more difficult to get back into the habit.
He ate because he had to, when the nausea stopped him from focusing. Cereal, cold toast, whatever required the least amount of effort not to wilt away. The fridge hummed with the grating buzz of electricity, so he unplugged it and lived out of the pantry instead. Laundry piled up on the small dining table, spilling out onto the chairs when he couldn’t force his tired limbs to sort and fold it, and he forgot to shave, then stopped trying to remember. His hair grew long and tangled, split ends scraping his skin and winding together into knots that he hacked at with kitchen scissors on the bathroom floor, tears slipping silently onto the tiles.
Freedom curdled into misery fast. Especially when the guilt of the family still hanging from him clung to every thought he had.
A year went by, liminal and full of tangible regret.
For the final proceedings, Etho pulled himself together. Shrugged on a clean shirt. Shaved his salt and pepper beard and fixed his hair as best he could.
Cleo watched him walk into the reception with something unreadable in their eyes.
“How are you?” she asked. Now, and twelve months ago, and fourteen years ago.
“Fine,” Etho lied.
Now, and twelve months ago, and fourteen years ago.
The hearing was short and decisive. The boys would spend one day a month with Etho. Cleo would take the house. It was nothing they hadn’t worked out forever ago, back when Etho had still been searching for a place to live.
“Would you do it differently?” Cleo asked strangely, hours after it was all over. Packets of fish and chips sat on their laps, warm even through the layers of butcher’s paper. They’d escaped to the river down the road from Cleo’s parents’ house, as they used to when they were young. One final time. “If we could go back to the start and do it all again, would you change?”
Would it have even made a difference?
Etho thought for a long time. Long enough that the tide rose to lick at his dangling feet with a salty tongue.
“No,” he eventually said. It was the truth; they both knew it.
Cleo swallowed, their expression solid, unchanging. But there was something in their eyes that shifted. Disappointment. Confirmation.
“I thought so,” she said.
They ate in silence after that.
When it was over, Etho went home in a haze and found someone online who’d buy his ring, then stared at that photo on the entry table until the sun went down, his nails digging deep into his arms.
He should have known he could never make it work.
Now, he had nothing, and no one to blame except himself.
Eight more months passed, the silence broken only by his usual contract work and Scar and Bdubs’ presence once a month. Etho took them to the park, to the movies, to that one pizza place they used to love — but never home. Never to the stifling mess of his apartment, not once, though he’d allocated a bedroom for them if he ever let them come.
His phone buzzed once every few hours, face down on the coffee table and generally ignored. The microwave dinged whenever dinner was ready. Cars whizzed by the balcony window that Etho barely opened, but other than that, he lived in stillness.
Then, Tango appeared, pounding on his front door.
“Oh, wow, this place is a wreck,” the man commented when Etho let him in, stepping over the empty bags of takeout at the front door. “I was gonna ask how you were holding up, but…”
Through his mask, Etho huffed but didn’t say anything. Tango had invited himself over; cleanliness had never been part of the deal, and he’d long since lost the energy to feel ashamed of the mess. Now, it just grated on the edges of his awareness, a constant sense of Sisyphean untidiness that made his leg bounce whenever he thought about it too hard. It would take hours, if not days, to return the apartment to a presentable state, and those were hours of motivation he didn’t have.
He was going to wilt away here, amongst the wreckage of his life. Etho was sure of it.
“Why—” he started to ask, but his voice wasn’t ready for it, rough and crackly. He cleared his throat. “Why are you here?”
He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d talked to another person. Days, maybe. He was far too out of practice.
Tango breezed through the mess and set a cooler bag down on the laminate kitchen counter, doing a double-take at the empty fridge before realising it had been unplugged.
“Check your emails,” he said flatly, the remnants of annoyance in his tone. “I had a job for you in April.”
Etho’s stomach clenched. “Oh.”
Tango shrugged like it was old news, and Etho lingered in the front hallway, his hands knotting together in front of him.
“It’s too late now. But I figured someone should make sure you were still breathing.” Tango toed the power outlet by the fridge, and moments later, it flickered on. “It’s not like you to pass up a job.”
That was… nice, Etho guessed. In all honesty, they didn’t know each other that well. Tango had done the electrics for a new post office outside of town over a decade ago, and Etho had set up their computers and troubleshooted the new software for a few weeks. Their contracts had overlapped for a while, Tango had mentioned a video game he was working on during one lunch break, and they’d met for drinks a few times a year to talk about it ever since.
Etho considered Tango one of his only friends, though he was sure the other man rarely thought about him like that.
He’d crashed on Tango’s couch more times than he’d like to admit, regardless.
“There’s a game on in a bit. I brought a couple beers, thought we could catch up,” Tango continued as he unpacked the contents of his bag. “Do you watch sports?”
Etho swallowed, tugging his mask further up over his nose. He didn’t trust his voice, so he shook his head.
Tango grinned.
“Me neither. This’ll be great.”
Etho didn’t understand what he meant, but he drifted towards the couch regardless, and Tango picked up the remote, so there was nothing he could do but let it happen.
It was a football game, in the end.
Tango kept the volume down low, opting to fill the rest of the room with his own remarks. He pressed a cold beer into Etho’s hand without ceremony, condensation slick against their palms, then returned to the kitchen counter where he’d left his bag, sifting through it to find something else Etho wasn’t paying attention to.
The tap ran, a few cupboards opened, and commentary came from both the speakers and the kitchen. The game played on, a blur of colour and motion that Etho barely processed, his gaze fixed somewhere near the screen but not really on it, and he tried not to feel disoriented by how abruptly his apartment had filled with life.
“Is that laundry clean?” Tango asked him at some point, and Etho barely thought before he nodded.
The first quarter passed, then the second, Etho’s beer barely touched. Tango kept talking, recounting some tame customer stories from his bakery, but he didn’t sit down, and it took Etho a while to figure out why.
He didn’t realise it at first, but Tango was… sorting things. Checking the use-by dates on the backs of old cans, bagging up the trash beneath the sink, idly wiping benches down as he watched the game play out on the television across the room. It wasn’t rushed or pointed — just movement, quietly busying himself, like the apartment was something that could be coaxed back into order by degrees.
Etho watched as the mess slowly faded from sight, the ever-present weight of his limbs lightening with it, and he found his chest free of nagging guilt for the first time in…
God, maybe years.
Tango didn’t fix everything, but he made a dent. And by the end, when the game was well and truly over, the apartment looked like somewhere Etho could breathe in.
They didn’t talk about it. They weren’t close enough for that. But Tango sat down on the couch with his own drink and glanced at the ads Etho was staring at in comfortable silence, and said:
“So, I know this guy…”
Two weeks later, Etho was at a bar.
He’d found a quiet spot at the bench, instinctively seeking the corner farthest from the band across the room, and he’d bought a beer even though he didn’t really drink. It was late, the sun a dying, indigo flame dipping just below the windowsill behind him, and the birds returning to their trees were shrieking through the open door. Tango’s friend worked a lot, or at least more than Etho did, which was a low bar. 6pm on a Monday had been the only time that fit.
With a performative sigh meant for no one in particular, Etho briefly pulled his mask down and took another sip of his now-half-empty beer.
It was mild, boring, relatively bitter. The sort of thing his father used to drink. He didn’t know why he’d thought it was a good idea, but he’d asked for it when his waiting had ticked over the twenty-minute mark, and now his hands were all slick with condensation.
Served him right for arriving half an hour early.
Another sip. Another sigh. Was he ever gonna come?
This had been a stupid idea. Etho should really, really go—
“Erm.” There was a man standing behind him. Blue jacket, jeans. He tried his hardest not to look startled. “Are you Etho?”
Etho unclenched his hand around his drink and ran it through his hair instead, shifting in his chair to meet the man’s eyes.
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely, finding blue among the monochrome backdrop of the bar’s nameless patrons. “Hi. You’re Scott?”
It was clear within a fortnight that Etho’s apartment was not where he was going to wilt away.
“Talk to him, y’know, get to know each other. That’s all I’m askin’,” Tango had said on the couch, a piece of paper held out between his fingers. “He needs a friend, and so do you.”
A friend.
Etho didn’t know if it was Tango’s intention or not, didn’t know if it was good for him or a step in the worst direction, but never once did Scott feel like just a friend.
That probably had something to do with the way Etho was kissing him now, two weeks after they’d met, making something between the most unhealthy decision of his life and the one move he needed to be able to breathe again.
Scott kissed like warm honey coiled around a wooden dipper. Amber, viscous. Sweet as the box of fruit loops Etho had taken from his hands as he’d stepped toward him. He pooled between the old cracks in Etho’s heart and held the pieces together just firmly enough to keep him from feeling trapped, and he matched every slow, languid press of Etho’s lips with gentle willingness.
It felt right. Like the world had settled in Etho’s chest, and the fluttering, anxious feeling he’d grown used to handling died down for the first time in years.
When Etho pulled away, he kept hold of Scott’s chin and looked into his eyes, half-lidded. Within them, soft and blue, he saw a future beyond tomorrow.
“Hi,” Scott said quietly, a small smile on his soft red lips.
“Hello,” Etho replied dumbly, realising he was staring. His free hand flexed and closed beside him when he processed what he’d just done, the only thing he could do to keep himself from bolting. “Uh.”
“Don’t apologise,” Scott warned softly. It was as though he could read minds. He reached up to brush his thumb over the fingers holding his chin in place, prying them away to entwine their hands. Another smile, liquid sunset. “I’ve been waiting.”
Etho’s mind latched onto the word, dragging him with it. Waiting. Too long? Not long enough? Had Etho been too slow?
Scott glanced down at where Etho’s other hand was still flexing, sparks of anxiousness flicking out into the air, then met his eyes again. Etho had to look away.
“For you, silly,” Scott explained, giving him a squeeze. “I wanted to.”
In a few ways, in a few quiet moments, Scott reminded him of Cleo.
The words settled, deep and careful in Etho’s heart. Wanted, waiting. Scott was going at his pace. It made something ache beneath his ribs, a soft, almost-pain that he didn’t immediately try to smother.
“Oh,” he managed. It came out thin, surprised.
Scott laughed under his breath, a fond little sound that made Etho want to kiss him again, just to taste the sweetness of his voice. Instead, he just swayed closer, suspended in Scott’s orbit, and that was enough.
He hadn’t realised how tired he was of his empty personal space.
Months passed: two, then four, then six. Scott never got less beautiful.
Etho held onto him tightly, waiting for the other shoe to drop but never finding it. He learned from what hadn’t worked with Cleo. Stopped keeping so many secrets. “Do you want to let me in?” Scott coaxed in the middle of the night four months in, and Etho did, if only a little.
“Would you do it differently?” Cleo had asked. It turned out the answer was yes. Something positive had to come from the way he’d hurt her, even if it could never have been worth it.
He was determined to be good this time, to make it work. It was a selfish desire, he knew, when he’d left so much pain in his wake. Scar was angry, Bdubs was confused, Cleo had wasted nearly half their life on him. He shouldn’t have been the one to come out of this happy.
But he was. And Scott was something he just couldn’t give up.
So, he let Scott see him scared. Sad. Happy. Vulnerable. It wasn’t so much of a choice as it just happened naturally, over weeks and months of familiarity.
From the beginning, Scott had had a sort of charm that made Etho feel completely out of his depth. Every smooth remark made his stomach feel like goo, every smile perfectly soft, and every word was perfectly designed to pry Etho open. He was competent, and Etho wasn’t.
Slowly, sensitively, he took down Etho’s walls until there was only one left standing. One that Etho didn’t even think he was capable of disabling himself.
This was the tallest wall, and the oldest. It held all the rules he’d learned.
It was a warm Saturday afternoon when Etho noticeably slipped up. The real suprise was that it hadn’t happened sooner.
Scott was in the shower, washing off the sweat of a bright day at the park. They’d taken the kite out again after a disastrous first try two weeks ago, chilled Brie cheese oozing onto thin crackers with quince paste and deli meat — Scott’s idea. The sun had been pooling on the horizon when they got home to Etho’s apartment, the air still humid, and it was easing now, though hot with the full assault of summer.
Etho was on the couch, the pedestal fan nearby swinging back and forth to cover the length of the small living room. The TV was set to a random channel, voices blurring together, background noise, and he could hear the water running in the bathroom.
Scott was here. The day had been rich. Etho’s heart bloomed with a love that felt just right.
He’d kicked his shoes off at the door, his socks sweaty. Now, alone, Etho’s foot wiggled where it rested against the couch, a small, unconscious movement he didn’t bother to stop. It tapped and twisted lightly, energy spilling out of him since there was nowhere it needed to hide, and he felt a private smile spread across his unmasked lips.
He forgot he was doing it, honestly. Until Scott walked out, dressed in stolen clothes, and Etho’s leg froze and flew towards the ground.
Scott didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he didn’t say anything. He just passed through into the kitchen, muttering something about there being no hand soap left in the bathroom, then plopped himself down on the couch, right in front of the fan. After a moment, his arm draped over the backrest behind Etho’s shoulders, and his fingers played idly with the hem of Etho’s shirt sleeve.
It was usually soothing. But Etho’s thoughts spiralled anyway.
He couldn’t help the way his stomach twisted. The urge to reach for his mask and hide behind it. Joy had quickly curdled into shame, and the same impulse that had controlled his foot just seconds ago begged him to expel the rush of being caught through some other humiliating movement. A familiar itch built behind his ribs, pressure gathering in his chest, and…
Willing it away, his hand curled into a fist.
He pressed his knuckles into his thigh, hard enough to hurt a little, and the sharpness cut through the thought, just like it was meant to.
Scott’s fingers stilled.
“Hey,” he said — not accusatory, just curious. “You okay?”
Etho tensed. His fist loosened immediately, his hand going flat against his leg.
“Yeah,” he said too fast. “Sorry. Yeah, I’m fine.”
Scott frowned. He shifted, turning his body properly towards Etho now.
“You don’t need to be sorry,” he reminded. Then, carefully, “You do that sometimes. The hand thing.”
Etho’s stomach dropped.
He laughed, thin and dismissive. “Do I?”
“Mm,” Scott hummed, as if it was no big deal. “When you’re quiet. You clench your fist like you’re trying to… hold something back.”
Can’t you see that you’re embarrassing us all?
Heat crawled up Etho’s spine, prickling at the tips of his ears. His body reacted instinctively — spine straightening, limbs going still. Familiarly still.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t realise.” A lie. “I’ll— I’ll stop.”
Scott’s demeanour changed immediately.
“No,” he said. “No, Etho, that’s not what I meant.” He tilted his head to examine Etho’s expression. “Why would you stop?”
Etho shrugged, staring at his lap. “You want me to. Don’t be patronising.”
“Etho,” Scott breathed. “I didn’t say that.”
Didn’t he? He said it between the lines, which Etho had taught himself not to miss.
“You didn’t have to,” Etho replied, his voice flat. “People don’t like it when I pull crap like that. It’s weird.”
The word sat between them, strangely heavy.
“Weird?” Scott echoed.
Etho nodded once. Did he have to spell it out for him?
“I’m not normal, Scott, I’m a freak,” he said pointedly, his voice measured, and finally, Scott was quiet.
Almost too quiet. Still, unmoving, his jaw working beneath those intelligent blue eyes.
“I’m just—” Etho went on in the silence, losing a bit of certainty. “I’m just pretending.”
Scott swallowed.
“Etho,” he said quietly. “Did… Is that what your parents told you?”
There was no anger on his face. No judgement. But he looked hurt, and Etho wished he hadn’t been the one to put it there.
He cleared his throat around the lump that had settled there. “Yeah.”
Scott exhaled slowly, like he was trying to keep himself together.
“I didn’t know,” he said weakly. “I mean, I did know, but I thought— I dunno, I thought you were just… tense sometimes.”
Etho gave an apologetic smile. “I try not to do it around you.”
That seemed to make it worse. Scott’s sadness sharpened.
“You try not to,” he repeated. “Around me.”
Etho’s chest tightened. He was doing something wrong. Scott was misunderstanding, or… or something.
“I didn’t want you to think I was—” he started.
“What? That you’re human?” Scott interrupted. His voice was firmer now, but not unkind. “I want to know you, Etho, not some… version of you that your folks created.”
Etho’s fingers twitched, the urge to turn whatever was happening into something his primal brain could understand rising again. He fought it, even now.
Scott noticed.
“Hey,” he said softly. “You can do whatever you want. You know that, right? I won’t mind.”
Etho hesitated. His hand curled halfway, the impulse settling when his thumb met the pads of his fingers and rubbed, back and forth.
Scott reached out slowly, giving him time to pull away if he wanted to. Etho didn’t, and Scott’s hand rested over his wrist, warm and steady.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Scott said. “Or with you.”
Etho’s throat tightened. He didn’t know if those were words he was ready to hear.
“They all say there is,” he whispered.
Scott’s thumb brushed over the back of his hand, soothing, posessive.
“Then, they’re wrong,” he said without hesitation. “Or they don’t understand.”
A shaky breath escaped Etho’s lips. The touch, the words…
His hand balled into a fist, and Scott squeezed back.
“You’re not a freak,” Scott continued. “You’re not embarassing. And you don’t make me uncomfortable.” His voice wobbled, just a little. “You make me want you to see yourself how I do.”
Etho’s heart cracked open, though his mind stalled.
“Oh…” he murmured, eyes burning. “No one’s ever…”
“I know,” Scott said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
They stayed there for a long moment, the TV playing unheard as Etho’s brain struggled to configue itself around this new suggestion. It didn’t fix him. It barely even touched the big, hideous mass that had settled deep within his heart since childhood.
But an inch was shaved off the stone brick wall the rules had built around him, and he felt it happen.
Etho was never any good at keeping still.
Maybe that was okay, after all.