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It would have been better for everyone, if Siegfried had just admitted it sooner. Easier. Tack up the turn-back signs, turn out the porchlights.
His gentleness had, he fears, left with Evelyn.
He's only glad that she held out long enough to see Tristan through to the tail end of his teens. Her last gift, he thinks. A lasting one.
On gray days in Darrowby- after fights- when he pours a glass of his father's choice drink- he mulls it over in his head. Dogged, but morbid, and all the more for it: he doesn't know if they'd have any sort of relationship, God, even contact, if he'd been left behind to carry Tristan that final stretch of his childhood all on his own. His horrible, fraying own. Would his little brother have even ever come back home from college?
Siegfried blinks rapidly, the world resolving out of reverie around him. Staring at his own face. Remembers he's standing before the wide vanity mirror of his bedroom. Doesn't remember for how long.
He'd just meant to step in to straighten his tie, before the conversation. (If he was lucky, and it could still be called that by the end.) At this rate, he'll never have it go loose again.
Deep breath in.
Out.
Siegfried lets his hands drop from the tie at last, and starts walking.
No one else in that house- surgery closed, the sun crisp and beckoning, January back with splendor. He'd chosen a good time for this. Nobody to overhear; easy through Skeldale's thin walls.
Even so. His heart beats a bad rhythm in his chest, unbecoming of a professional. Of someone as assured as him. Of the older brother. Somebody else should be doing this, it says. Anybody else.
But somebody else had tried. And everybody else had failed.
This, at least, is a skill Siegfried has, and has honed well: Not taking Tristan at his word.
His brother's steadfastly closed door has almost seemed to change the very shape of the hallway, make strange of the familiar. Really, Siegfried's only ever seen it shut for sleeping. He liked to leave it open, as a sign he'd gone out, and even when he was home, still cracked a friendly berth.
His fist rears back. Freezes. Mouth opens- and stops.
Or maybe it was always just so Siegfried wouldn't have to knock so loud.
Who would have ever imagined? Out of practice for hammering on Tristan's door, hollering his name.
Be brave.
Siegfried clears his throat, and manages to bristle into some semblance of the old self. THUD-THUD. "Tristan!?"
He tries again, quick enough that he can't tell from Tristan's inelegant grunt if it took the two knocks to wake him, or if he already was.
The doorknob, tentative in Siegfried's grip, only to be wrenched hard at the signs of life. He's inside the room before he remembers to ask entry, and maybe he meant to do that, and probably didn't, but it doesn't matter at all, not at all, the instant he looks down.
Atop twisted covers, Tristan is all arms and legs at scrappy angles, his head disconcertingly boneless where it lays canted on the pillow.
Siegfried's mind helpfully supplies him with the image of a limp hare. Twisting in the wind, made dead by its foot caught in a snare.
"Wh- whuh? Whudduh you want?" Tristan mumbles, flopping his head vaguely toward the direction of Siegfried's stamping.
His hair looks unusually heavy and wet, in a way that makes Siegfried want to check just one more time for a fever. Ask Tristan to tolerate one more lingering hand on his forehead.
He knows they won't find one.
"It- it's four in the afternoon," Siegfried says, as plainly as he can. He'd made that mistake the first few times. Biting. Accusatory. Demanding.
Not again, if he can help it. If he can help it.
"And?" Tristan croaks. "So?" There- that running thread of agitation his little brother, far too unlike him, has been unable to shake.
"It's a nice day outside. Everybody else is out. Even Mrs. Hall."
If there's a hint, Tristan misses it. "I think I'll take a rain check. If that's all right with you."
"No, that's not what I-" he groans, restarts, "No one has seen you since yesterday morning."
That's not exactly true. Mrs. Hall had wordlessly carried up the breakfast extras sometime around 10, but Siegfried had checked in later on, just a quick step past the door, then step, then step, then helplessly standing inside while Tristen breathed sluggish through sleep.
To that point, the small tray set neatly on the nightstand to his easy-reach left. Nothing on it has moved since Siegfried last saw it. Looking inside: if he didn't personally remember kippers as part of that meal, he wouldn't have been able to place what it used to be. Left out long enough that it's dried out flaked, and developed a brown crust along the bowl's sides.
"Gods, man! When was the last time you ate?!"
"What? Oh." A pause. "Um." A pause. "It's fine. I'm not actually hungry."
"You should be. Well and starving, too."
"Look, is there something you wanted? I was asleep, you know," Tristan finally snaps in true. "And why are you in my damn room?"
Siegfried can't do much more than breathe sharply through flared nostrils for a moment. Then, his anger surges him firmly toward the window, and lashing open its curtain.
"Sit up. We... I need to talk to you."
The difference is night-and-day, very literally. Light hits Tristan full in the face- he lows, like (a wounded animal, Siegfried would know that sound-) someone's stretching out an underused muscle.
But something in Siegfried's tone has him following the order without further complaint, rolling over and up onto his elbows. Yet he's swaying- shaking?- even as he does so, like a drunk might. (Is this what it is? Could that be it? He's got that good, strong, drink-them-under-the-table Farnon blood in him. Siegfried can't imagine something like this coming to collect its dues, especially so young. Right?)
Weathering his brother's silent glare. Pulse thrumming in his ears: Not-you, not-you. Someone-else. Someone-else.
Siegfried rolls the words around in his mouth, then spits them out- "Tristan, I... I think you should see a doctor."
Tristan immediately frowns down and away, embarrassed. It almost makes him miss the unusually hateful look of before.
"I don't..." Siegfried imagines that he's about to finish with "want to", but they both seem to realize how childish that would sound. "It's not that serious. I- Genuinely, Siegfried, it's like I've been saying! I just need some rest, and then I'll be-"
"Right as rain? Back at it in no time? Fine by tomorrow?" he echoes Tristan's own mollifications back at him. "When was the last time you even met with Charlotte?"
"That was-"
"Where she didn't make the trek all the way over here to see you?"
"She doesn't mind," he huffs.
"See, I wouldn't either!" If I could be sure that's all this was. "But- you've been resting. And I-" am starting to worry that it's something more. "-do believe that's enough, now."
If Siegfried could be proud of nothing else, through whatever mishaps and misfires he might have plodded right into while bringing up Tristan- never, not even once, ever- did he lay a hand on the young boy.
But with words like these, who needs a rod?
His little brother reels back, sharp, as if he'd just caught a nasty palm clean across the cheek.
"Oh," Tristan says. Then, quieter, "Oh. I see."
And, worst of all,
"I'm sorry."
On the cobblestone square outside, horsehooves patter distant nonsense. Closer home, mewling in the pet cages. Beneath his feet, creaking floorboards, long and low as a snake's hiss.
"I've left you and James rather high and dry with the surgery, haven't I? No, I know," is continued, with no way of knowing Siegfried's silence is one of personal horror- "I won't be shocked if it's hard to believe, but I truly don't intend on spending my demobbed life entirely lazing about."
A weak, shameful smile slowly carves its way back into his face.
Back onto his face.
Oh, God. When was the last time Siegfried saw him smile in a way that wasn't apologetic?
Do something, damn it! Be the older brother! Be a brother. Be the person who can find each exacting word he needs to hear. Be better than... this, whatever it is, whatever this useless-frozen-deer-thing he can't seem to stop becoming is.
Be the head of the household. Be smart. Be a man. Be a soldier. Be a professional. Be a vet.
...Be a vet.
Tristan exclaims indignantly as the bed dips down under Siegfried's surprise kneeling weight, wild-eyed and reaching toward him, a man very suddenly on a mission.
He exclaims even louder when his face is clasped tight between two hands, a weathered palm molding fast to each cheek. But he doesn't fight out of it.
For some reason, he doesn't fight out of it.
Siegfried manipulates his head a clinical left, right, left. The instinct to pocket-fumble for his glasses is dramatically absent. Without even having to squint:
"You- bloody fool. What was your plan here, exactly? To wait until the household's Sunday prayers for you turned nightly?" Until everyone else's did?
"Huh?" Tristan asks eloquently.
Siegfried sighs, soft. Restarts.
"Do you remember when Evelyn stopped coming to watch the racehorses with us?"
His pupils blow an answering seen-a-ghost wide. Siegfried's fault. 13 to 21, 21 to 33. More years without her than with her now. And- sister in law- the college had barely accepted the reason for his long absence. Requested a copy of the death certificate.
"We gave up fairly quickly, after that," Tristan murmurs.
"I was the one who first posed it, you know. That she'd take the Saturday off to rest. I think she must have learned to brush past it all. 'I'm just tired, today. You boys have fun. I'll join you next time.'"
He's smiling, that horrible smile that seems only to be reserved for talking of the dead. Tristan's gaze ticks awkwardly away and back, face still grasped in steady scrutiny before Siegfried, but unsure if the polite thing is to break stare or hold it.
"-But no amount of sleep was taking the bruises from her eyes. Putting the color in her cheeks back where it belonged. There wasn't even time enough to pretend it was nothing. By spring..."
The ground was easy to dig up.
He brushes a thumb slowly over his brother's pallid cheek. "I just got you back. Please…"
This is the vet's life: Emergencies. On the run, on the clock, see the right signs at the right time. The best of two bad choices. Smile and reassure. Bark and take a stand. Never forget who really comes first. Remember that it's the people who will keep one blinking at 3:00 A.M. ceiling.
This is, even more than all that, the vet's life: Waiting. Come back in X days, weeks. We'll see if that works. Give it time. It's all one can do. If she doesn't get better, then. If he gets worse, then.
So, Siegfried waits.
Keep a close eye on her.
How much closer do you want me to get?
And just about jolts when cold fingers at last ribbon around his wrist.
"Okay," Tristan says. Except, it isn't quite a word that first time. Siegfried waits while he swallows thickly, coughs, and-
A stiff, if watery nod into Siegfried's cupped hands. "Okay."