Chapter Text
You look down at the mini shot bottles in your hands, swiped from the complimentary bar in the airport lounge, and decide on [favorite alcohol], making eye contact with the taxi driver through the rearview mirror as you throw it back with expertise, dropping the other in one of the many pockets of your cargo pants.
You’re no alcoholic, you’re not even particularly partial to drinking, but liquid courage is only the start of what you’re going to need to go back home. You’ve been abroad in the United States for the past six years, having left to go to university on a full ride at 18 and staying until you finished your master's degree making you now 24 and only just gainfully employed. You had been able to secure a remote job right after graduation and since your visa to stay in America was almost up you took your high school best friend’s offer to stay with her and her family for a little while, traveling back to the rural Irish town you had grown up in where she still lives.
As you watch the world go by outside the window you wonder if the people you used to know will even recognize you. Ursula your best friend will, thanks to a thousand Facetime calls over the past six years, but while you don’t look different per se you feel completely foreign, like you’re traveling back in time to dream you had once as a child, now an adult and too big and awkward for the world you had knew then.
You try not to think about them , the family you had when yours left you alone, you still have Ursula and that should be enough. The only issue is that if you want to get high at any point while stuck in your hometown for the foreseeable future, and you will, you’re going to have to see him and them again thanks to the monopoly he has on the marijuana supply. You frown out the window, pissed that you hadn’t taken the chance of smuggling anything over, your anxiety and need to be responsible with your life having won over your hobby of eating edibles and watching movies in languages you don’t understand for the fun of it. Hopefully, Ursula won’t have gone full square since having her kid Jack and will have a stash you can beg her out of.
Soon the taxi driver pulls into the neighborhood Ursula lives in with her son and mom, Drummond Rise estate. You pay him an exorbitant amount given the insane fare from the airport in the nearest city all the way out here in the middle of fucking nowhere, but it's worth it, you’ve missed your friend even if you hate nearly everything else about the town you’re from. The driver helps you to get your bags out of the car and leaves you on the curb of the unassuming house Ursula lives in. You steel yourself for the reunion, the reality of what is happening and where you are hitting you like a hurricane. You are only halfway up the drive when the front door bursts open with a bang and Ursula darts out with a whoop of your name.
“Urs!” you grunt out as she launches herself at you, knocking the breath from your lungs as she envelops you into a hug. You drop your bags at your feet as she does so.
She’s never been particularly expressive or touchy but you suppose it's a special occasion given the fact the two of you haven’t even been on the same continent for a small lifetime. You hug her back with a laugh, the shaved-down side of her head tickling your cheek as she squeezes you. She pulls back after a moment to look at you. You see that she still has her hair done platinum blonde and cut short, the new edition of the side that's shaven gives it an almost mohawk-like appearance. Her eyes are dark with her signature mascara and a whisper of a smoky eye making her light eyes pop further. She’s just as pale as ever but looks good albeit in need of more rest not that your insomniac ass can say much.
“God you’re really here!” she says, voice bright.
You smile hard enough your cheeks ache, tears prick your eyes but you blink them away rapidly.
“I am, I am, and you Urs, fuck it's been forever! Facetime doesn’t do you justice you’ve only got prettier and prettier over the years, it's fucking annoying honestly,” you say with a cheeky smile.
She pushes you away from her playfully.
“Like you can say anything you bitch! Not only are you a certified world traveler you’re hot and have money to boot thanks to your new job, to think you’d become all this when we met, sick as dogs in the park. Every time I bring Jack there I still remember the taste of [favorite alcohol] and how you forced me to watch your rendition of murder on the dancefloor complete with an interesting attempt at the choreography, all that and you hadn’t even told me your name yet,” she says with a snort.
Your face burns at the distant memory. Back in your junior year of high school, the year everything went to shit, you had gotten into a fight with him and decided to drink away your sorrows alone on the slide at the park down the road from your apartment, so late into the night that really it was early the next day. You had been humming a song to yourself and throwing back swig after swig from the bottle of [favorite alcohol] you stole from his house on your way out when you looked up and saw a blonde girl you recognized as a girl from school who was a year below you looking down at you with amusement. You had hiccuped before offering the bottle which she accepted with a laugh and you ended up staying up with her until dawn, trading sips from the bottle and stories and by the time you stumbled home the two of you had been best friends. She had turned an awful night, an awful year, into one of the best you ever had and being back with her now makes you happy enough to cry.
Ursula grabs one of the bags at your feet and leads you inside. The house is warm, cozy, and familiar in a way that makes your chest ache. She leads you to the small guest room, the one you had occupied for the last few months of your senior year before you had gone to the United States. It’s done up much the same with the addition of a small collection of toys you assume are Jacks and a tower of plastic storage bins in the corner. Other than that a twin bed is shoved up against the wall, a dresser next to it with some of your old books and trinkets on its surface. The sight of them makes you teary which you ignore.
The both of you set the bags on the floor before looking at each other, getting used to seeing each other in person rather than through a screen. She hums before throwing herself onto the bed heavily. You look down at her amusedly before flopping down beside her.
“Where’s the kid? Your mom?” you ask, staring up at the ceiling.
She shifts next to you, burrowing into the blankets.
“Jack’s out with my mom, he likes going on walks and she knows how to handle him well enough. Arm’s still around, sort of. Obviously, we’re not together but he comes around sometimes to visit with Jack.”
You hum. Arm, short for Douglas Armstrong, is Ursula's ex-boyfriend and the father of her son Jack. In high school, you had been quick friends with Arm having met him a couple of years before you met Ursula that fateful night. You met Arm through him so that sin coupled with his eventual breakup with Ursula meant that you stopped being friends, loyalty taking the two of you in opposite directions.
You aren’t surprised by his involvement in Jack’s life given everything you’ve heard over the years but you wonder what they’re like together given both of their peculiarities. Arm is the strong silent type, meant to feel but not to articulate his feelings, Then Jack is nonverbal, autistic in a town with no way to support him as he should be. You can’t imagine Arm as a father in general, Ursula having gotten pregnant and giving birth in the year after you left, but even more so to a kid as different as Jack. Arm is the type who would either understand Jack in his oddness or be completely out of his depth and you hope for Jack and Ursula’s sake it's the former.
“I’m excited to meet the kid in person, he’s a fucking angel on Facetime so I'm guessing he’s a right demon in the flesh, no kid of yours could be well behaved Urs, you’re much too cool to pass on something as boring as politeness,” you say, turning to her with a wink.
She laughs, pushing your shoulder.
“Fuck off, you’re the bad influence in this friendship and we both know it, the first thing you ever did was hand me liquor!”
You pout.
“I was seventeen! You couldn’t expect me to be anything but wild at an age like that…” you say, teasing.
“Feck off, I was barely sixteen and as far as wild teenagers go you were feckin far up on the list. Fucking Dympna and his family, they’re a special kind of poison I swear, all the Devers, accept Charlie of course, she’s a saint from what you’ve told me.”
You flinch at the mention of him and his family. Dympna is a wound that’s never closed and isn’t likely to. He was your childhood friend turned first love, you don’t have many memories that didn’t include either him or one of his seven sisters up until junior year when you broke up, cast out of all of their lives in an instant. It was an implosion of your world but in the end was something of a big bang, an unparalleled explosion that set you off into orbit, onto a path that led you to Ursula and all of the good things that came to you after. It may have been the thing that allowed you to become as successful as you are now, but fuck it had hurt to lose everyone you loved in one fell swoop.
The only members of the Devers family you’ve had much contact with in the years since are Charlie, Lisa, and June.
Charlie is Dympna’s much younger sister and you’ve kept in contact via the postcards and letters you've sent to each other since you left when she was eight. She’s sweet and innocent in a way none of the other Devers children were able to be for long.
Then there’s Lisa, his sister who is one year younger than him making her the same age as you and the person who brought you into the family in the first place as you had been in her class in elementary school. She had sat next to you in class and once she found out you could braid hair had become your friend, inviting you over to the Dever’s house often enough that your own quickly became unfamiliar. You had evolved from Lisa’s friend to Dympna and Lisa’s friend until eventually you were Dympna’s girl and Lisa became less a part of your life. That was before junior year of course, after that both of you were little more than strangers. You’ve mostly kept up with her via social media, liking each other’s posts but never truly engaging. There’s an invisible line between you, one that Dympna had drawn and neither of you had bothered to cross since.
As for June, she’s the matriarch of the Devers clan, a surrogate mother figure and a candidate for sainthood in your opinion. She had raised eight children the best she could given the difficult circumstances of her husband Neddy’s life and influence and still found time to be kind to you, an orphan always only ever a bad moment from being on the streets. You had found refuge in her home as a child, acceptance as part of the Devers clan until you weren’t, and you’ll love her forever for those warm years. You’ve kept in touch with her through the random, often overtly religious posts she would send you via Facebook, accompanied with messages about how much she missed you and wished you would come back and beat some sense into her eejit of a son. You had always skirted the issue of Dympna but were thankful for how she still made sure to include you in her life, even if it was in such an insignificant way. It’s allowed you to forget yourself and everything that happened for a couple of moments over the years which you almost feel as if you owe her for.
You haven’t told anyone except for Ursula about your return so you're in for a reaming by June on top of all of the awkward and inevitable conversations with everyone else. Information travels fast in a town as small as this one, and nothing happens without Dympna knowing. You shiver at that thought, not ready to see him again, if ever. Probably should have factored that into your decision to come back to the town he practically runs but oh well.
Ursula continues talking, not noticing the way you’ve gone still and silent in thought.
“Speaking of Charlie, what did you bring her for her birthday? And more importantly, for me for being your best friend?” she asks.
You snort, turning back to her, broken out of your head for the moment.
“For Charlie, I’ve brought some of those K-pop albums she’s been wanting, ones that don’t deliver to Ireland but do to the good ol’ U S of A. Fucking expensive they were but totally worth it, the girl’s going to freak out when she gets them. As for you, isn’t my presence enough?” you ask, lips stretched into a mockingly saccharine grin.
She deadpans before swiping at your head.
“Feck no! You better have brought me something or you’ll have to sleep in the slide at the park, again,” she says, reminding you of one of the few times you've ended up passed out after a particularly rowdy night in the slide you met her at, apparently your inebriated self's favorite spot.
You laugh before hauling yourself up to your feet. You stretch with a yawn, the time difference hitting you out of nowhere. You stoop down, opening one of the bags you brought.
“I’ve obviously brought you shit Urs, I barely had room for my own shit with the amount of things I bought for you, Jack, and your mom,” you say, rifling through the bag and taking out item after item.
Ursula kneels down at your side, oohing and aahing at the different things you reveal. Mostly snacks you can’t find easily in Ireland, some clothes, toys for Jack, and a shit ton of alcohol from duty-free. She gushes over the gifts as you stifle back more yawns. She takes notice of your exhaustion.
“Want to turn in? You must be fecked from the trip.”
You go to answer but yawn instead, making her laugh.
“I’ll take that as a yes. You know where the bathroom is, nothing's changed since you left really, just child-proofed. If you need anything I'm just across from you, I hope you invested in noise-canceling headphones since Jack will be home soon,” she says, standing up, arms weighed down with gifts.
You nod with a smile plucking them from your bag and twirling them around your finger. She smiles at your movement.
“Thanks, Urs, for everything,” you say, standing up, trying to inject meaning and gratitude into your words.
“Of course, you’re always welcome here, we’re best friends forever, remember?” she says cheekily before leaving with a wink, closing the door behind her softly.
You hum in the sudden silence, standing alone in the middle of the room. After a minute of basking in the stillness, you unpack only enough to get ready to sleep. You shrug off your clothes, change into a ratty old band shirt and pair of sweatpants, brush your teeth in the bathroom down the hall, and slide into bed.
You stay awake for a while, thinking about the last time you slept in this bed, back when you were eighteen and still utterly heartbroken, used to keeping your head down in public to avoid catching sight of Dympna’s brilliant blue eyes, perpetually trained on you even after he told you how little you meant to him. You sigh as the past washes over you, as thick and dangerous as water overhead. You fall asleep thinking of him, feeling for the first time in a long time the absence of him next to you.