Chapter Text
More than once Will came home with Chuckie after school. They’d let their bags fall heavily to the floor and they’d take off their dirty shoes and walk to the kitchen with empty stomachs, skin still sticky with sweat from baseball practice or from running to the bus or from fighting with boys much older than them.
When Chuckie's ma was home, she would always smile at them and say “Oh, look what the cat dragged in.” And she said it to Will with a smile on her face, meaning Chuckie, never implying that Will could be anything but welcome in their house.
And Will and Chuckie would sit down at the table, no matter how old, and eat whatever they could find to eat. Some days it was cold lasagna from the day before, some days it was stale bread, some days it was pasta they’d cook for themselves, some days it was cake that Chuckie's ma had brought from her book club meeting, and as they grew older the lemonade turned into beer, but apart from that, nothing really changed.
When they were kids, Chuckie’s ma forced them to sit down and do their homework before they could go out to play. And of course Will was done with it in minutes while Chuckie was biting his pen over fractions and historical events and Shakespeare and most of all boredom.
If you asked him about the proudest moment in his whole life he’d either tell you the day he hit a home run in tenth grade, or the day that he helped Will Hunting with his Spanish homework. Because Chuckie had an uncle from Mexico, the husband of his ma’s sister, Marty, and he stayed a whole summer in Mexico with his family more than once, so he spoke quite a bit of Spanish. Enough at least to get through high school. And Will was moody and bored and didn’t pay attention in class because it was so boring, so when they sat down at the kitchen table together, and he turned to Chuckie to complain that they hadn’t had anything of this in class, Chuckie was already done with it and reading a comic book with a mouth full of carrot sticks.
“You suck,” Chuckie had said, reading over the fill in the gaps task that they’d been given. He told Will what to write down and he was patient and in just a couple of minutes it was all back to normal and they threw their homework back into their bags and went over to the TV to play the 1988 sega hockey game or watch some movie on a VHS that they hadn't rewound the time before, so it was stopped on some random fight sequence they had copied with sticks in the garden.
Chuckie and Will had met when they were just ten years old. Because Will moved in just two streets away, into a house where a family was already living.
“Where do you come from,” Chuckie had said, his nose running with mild hay fever and his palms skinned almost to the bone with the fall he had taken when an older guy had pushed him to the side during baseball practice.
He had looked at Will then. Taller than him, blond with a bowl cut and bright and so not Southie that it irritated him more than the fact that he was just standing around in front of the house. Morgan was running around somewhere inside, knees probably bloody and his shoes all dirty.
Will didn't say anything, just looked. And behind him stood a woman that Chuckie had seen before, just not with a son.
“You're Chuckie, right? Chuckie Sullivan?” the lady asked. Chuckie just nodded. “Is your ma home?”
Chuckie nodded again, the door handle in hand, leaning against the door with a frown.
“Ma! Someone's at the door!” he called back over his shoulder. Before his mother arrived, Morgan came to stand next to him, sniffing the same way Chuckie had before.
“Who are you?” he asked, almost hiding behind Chuckie.
“Shut up, Morgan. Go play somewhere else,” Chuckie said, pushing him away by his curly head. His mother came to the door shortly after, brushing over Morgan's head in passing, an apron around her waist and beetroot juice all over it.
“Oh Suzie, hello,” she said, looking at the lady and then down at Will, who was still staring right ahead like a perfectly drilled soldier. “Do you guys want to come in?”
The lady, Suzie, looked at his mother a little longer, before speaking again. “This is Will,” she said, handling him like there was an electric fence around him and you'd get shocked if you touched him. “He moved in with us a while ago,” she smiled with all her teeth on display.
“Oh well, hello Will,” Chuckie’s ma smiled, holding her beet root red hand out for Will to shake. “Oh, sorry about the red. That stuff never washes off, but I promise it won't stain,” she smiled, and Will didn't look her in the eyes but shook her hand anyway.
“This is my son, Chuckie,” she said then, putting a hand on her son's shoulder and pulling him closer to her. “You guys seem to be the same age, no?”
“Ma, let go of me,” Chuckie grumbled, pushing her away.
“Do you guys want to play while Suzie and I drink some coffee?” his mother said, and when Chuckie shrugged and Will stepped over the door threshold into the house, she brushed over his head like she did with Morgan just moments before, leading him into the house. Chuckie could have sworn that he saw Will flinch at the touch, but not because he looked scared of something, he just seemed surprised. No wonder with how up-tight Suzie stood next to him.
They went up to Chuckie's room, running into Morgan again on the way through the small corridor, but the boy seemed too stuck in his own world to care.
“That's not your ma, right?” Chuckie asked, his voice forced lower than it usually was. He sat down on his bed, leaving Will to stand in his room.
Will looked around the shelves full of books, looked at the desk that was cluttered with abandoned drawings and unfinished homework. He let his eyes wander over the dinosaur and baseball posters and superhero comics and the bright lava lamp and all the other little bits and things hanging on his walls and from the ceiling. He shrugged. “I guess she is now,” he said.
Chuckie didn't get what he meant, but he watched as Will walked over to his sports trophies and very few medals he'd gotten from little league games. “What?” he asked, frowning at the strange boy in his room. He watched as Will paced around, watching his back as Will shrugged.
“She's my foster mother. I don't know her that well yet, but she lives across the street with a man called Howard and he never comes home past midnight and he cheats on her with his coworker but she doesn't know. And she's trying to impress the neighbours with her marriage and her perfect front lawn but they never had kids because one of them is infertile, I guess it's her, so they just went to the orphanage one day and shopped for me. So I guess she's my mother now, at least in her own mind, but I don't think she likes me that much,” he said without much of a pause between sentences.
“What?” Chuckie said again. Will was standing in front of his boardgame collection now, looking at each game individually.
“That’s not your brother either, is it?” Will asked, nodding towards the closed door.
“No. Well, kinda.” Chuckie shrugged.
“Right so the way that kid is your brother is the way I could become anyone's son with just a signature on a slip of paper. Nobody cares that much when you don't have parents in the first place,” Will said, and he said it with such ease that it made something in Chuckie feel crooked. He only had his ma, his father had left a while ago. Not having parents at all just seemed scary.
It was quiet for a beat. “You wanna play super mario?” Chuckie asked. His ma had gotten them a nintendo console for Christmas. She had worked day and night to get those dollars together, and both Morgan and Chuckie screamed when they opened the box on Christmas morning.
Will smiled for the first time that day. It was a bright smile and his eyes were hidden by it a bit, and Chuckie was happy to confirm that Will wasn't a spy or something like that.
Morgan had lived in Chuckie’s house as if he was his own brother. They didn’t spend every waking moment with each other, Morgan had his own room after a while. The guest room, usually, but for a while he filled it with comic books and magazines and trash and used tissues. Because Chuckie's ma knew Morgan's parents, and she knew they didn’t know how to put down the bottle. And after some time they didn't know how to get rid of needles and syringes either. Chuckie’s ma also knew what that did to a kid. They weren't bad people, just bad parents.
So Morgan slept over, ate breakfast, lunch and dinner with them, fought with Chuckie over who would get the last piece of chocolate and came home before he did some days, the keys for the house tied around his neck so he couldn't lose them. He lost his last baby teeth in their bathroom and learned how to shave his face from Chuckie when Chuckie was fifteen and Morgan was thirteen. He got ignored and yelled at and sometimes Chuckie came into his room just to turn the lights off and fart on his face. Morgan was his brother, if not connected by blood in their veins then certainly by scraped knees and spit and split lips and ruffled hair and shared laundry detergent and the rising water bill.
It didn’t last forever, and once he moved out again they had an unspoken vow to never speak of it as something unusual again. Because now Moran knew what it was like to be chased through the house, up the stairs, out the front door and all the way back to the bathroom with pure fear pumping through his veins, all because he went into Chuckie’s room without asking. And Chuckie knew what it was like to chase a kid all through the house, forgetting halfway through why you’re running and laughing at the look of absolutely scared shitless on his face. And while Chuckie was still mostly only ever yelling at Morgan, because Morgan was fucking annoying and didn’t know when to shut the fuck up, both knew that he’d kill anyone that dared to touch Morgan or bend just one hair on his head.
With Will it was different. Will stayed in Chuckie’s room with him, Will was everywhere where Chuckie was. They became inseparable. They went to school together, ate lunch together, got drunk together, laughed and joked and cried together, though they would never admit the last one. They played baseball together, got summer jobs together, drove home together, had street fights together, slept in the same bed sometimes. There was no possible situation in life that Will hadn't seen Chuckie in and none that Chuckie hadn't seen Will in. It was like they were one person.
One day Chuckie came home bleeding because he had launched himself at a much bigger kid. He tackled him off of Will like he had any chance at all, and even though he got a bunch of marks on his face now, they still lucked out of it.
“What is it with you and Will?” his ma had asked him once, sitting opposite of him at the kitchen table.
“Whadda ya mean?” he asked back, a spoon full of cereal in his mouth.
“You know, you spend so much time together. If it were Morgan you'd be at each other's throats in a matter of seconds, but you and Will spend days together and nothing breaks,” she smiled and leaned her head to the side.
“Yeah, but Morgan is dumb and Will isn't annoying,” Chuckie replied. His ma frowned at him disapprovingly.
But Chuckie loved Will, because Will was fun and he wasn't as fucking boring as everybody else. Will was smart and he knew more than just maths or the square root of every number you could throw at him. When they were working construction, Chuckie would regularly use him as a human calculator, but it wouldn't ever cross his mind that he wasn't more than that. He was a genius and a half, knew every book you could make up, knew what every philosopher said and when they lived and how it reads from different perspectives.
Will told everyone what he thought, bullied the high school bullies right back by bringing up their divorced parents or their inability to understand basic algebra or their misogynistic stupidity that came from their father that didn't know how to cook dinner for himself or do his laundry or get anything fucking done beyond smoking and drinking. He told teachers that they didn't know what they were doing, sat in detention more than once for saying that plagiarism wasn't education and that the director could be happy if the school wasn't shot up before anyone from there actually developed critical thinking skills. Sometimes Morgan and Will would meet up in detention the same way that Chuckie and Will did at lunch, and sometimes all three of them sat there with bloody noses and Billy from two grades above sat there as well, writing messages on scraps of paper, making fun of the teacher that was supposed to watch them.
Will won almost every round of chess that he and Chuckie played and he won Scrabble against Chickie's ma and her entire book club, and he lost so terribly at street fighter once that he got so upset he didn't speak for a while. He understood any card game in seconds and didn't remember the rules for any of them past the time he played it, there was just no room in his head for the rules of any game other than maybe poker or blackjack. He remembered those, even if Chuckie was miles and miles better than him when it came to that. Chuckie got kicked out of pubs and bars and even a fucking casino once because after a while they all understood he was counting cards in his head. And Will was there with him sometimes, smiling with the knowledge that nobody could tell what was going on for many many rounds and a lot of money.
But Will was brilliant, a whirlwind of thoughts and kindness and he was a fucking idiot at the same time and it made Chickie's heart grow bigger to think about. Because they'd be in his room together, and he'd be on his bed with his head hanging off the edge, counting the stripes of his wallpaper when Will would just sit up on the carpet and ask what water towers were for or he'd ask why animals aren't all sorted into the categories cat and dog. He'd just sit somewhere and randomly figure out that the Grammy is called Grammy because it's short for Gramophone, or he’d just blurt out asking if the White House would have a different name if they just decided to paint it blue one day. Some days Chuckie thought that Will just said those things to make him laugh, but others he seemed so genuine far from the answer it was hilarious to watch him figure it out when you told him.
They were kids then. When they got older there was way less that Will didn't know, apart from actor's names and neighborhood gossip. But he still stuck around to find out, listened to Morgan talking about what girls he liked and listened to Billy complain about the rude fucker that almost totalled his car the other night. Will stuck around.
Will continued to follow Chuckie home long after they had graduated high school. He still went to church with Chuckie's ma on some Sundays, mostly for the food there, and he still ate lunch with them when they fell from one job into the other, still went home with him after a night out. He spent Thanksgiving at Chuckie's house with Morgan and Chuckie's ma, eating and cooking and sitting on the sofa afterwards with all of them cramped on it, stomachs full and hearts even fuller, watching the baseball game or some reruns of some show they never watched in the first place.
Will was home to Chuckie the same way that Boston was.
For years and years and years they sat on the sofa together and watched movies, Will's legs in Chuckie's lap and Chuckie leaned back, a blanket shared between them. They shared the last drop of water in their water bottles with each other after baseball practice during a heatwave, they shared their last cigarettes and joints and beers, because if one of them had one then both of them had half. At some point they even shared a bank account, because whatever money they made would go into something they shared anyway.
One time when they were teens they dozed off together on the sofa after a long day of school and work and practice, and they had been with each other all day so there wasn’t much to talk about anymore. The TV was glowing with a muted game, the table in front of them was covered in dirty dishes and they laid on the sofa with their legs stacked on top of each other. Chuckie’s ma walked into the room as she came home from work, looking at her son and the boy she always knew would break his heart one day, and without waking them she walked back out the room.
Will grumbled and stretched as he woke up with one of Chuckie’s feet on his ribs and the other somewhere behind his back. Chuckie stirred awake beside him not long after, rubbing his eyes to look at the clock behind Will.
“Wh’ time’s it?” Will rubbed his eyes as well and his spine cracked vertebrae for vertebrae all the way up to his neck.
“Ten thirty,” Chuckie grumbled, his eyes closed again and his arms folded over his chest.
“Shit, I gotta go,” Will said, jumping up and dropping the blanket on the floor.
“Calm the fuck down, will you? You can sleep over.” Chuckie's voice was deep and rumbly and it sounded like his tongue was heavy in his mouth.
“Not today, I gotta get home in like ten seconds or I’m gonna be dead meat and you can scrape me off a sidewalk.” Will searched for his keys in the mess on the table in front of them. When he found them, he rushed to the door and laced up his boots.
Chuckie got up with a sigh and leaned in the doorway and watched him fumble with the zipper on his jacket. “So, I won't get a good night kiss?” he smiled, his eyes still tired and a bit red, his nose scrunched up and his skin shimmering in the dim haze of the little orange ceiling light.
Will’s face split with a grin and a laugh punched from the core of his chest out of him. He walked toward the door and Chuckie followed to say good bye and check if he crossed the street safely, but Will stood in front of him a little longer than usual and he got on his tip toes and gave Chuckie a small and quick peck on the lips.
Chuckie blinked at him with his expression fully blank before a grin broke loose again. “Get the hell up out of here,” he laughed, moving his arm to hit Will, who dodged his half hearted hit with a grin before hitting back.
“Are you blushing?”
“Shut the fuck up or I’ll get to you before anyone else could. Now fuck off, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he pushed him away by his head.
“Uh huh, love you!” Will called over his shoulder as he ran down the steps of the door.
“Love you, too,” Chuckie grumbled and closed the door behind him after he watched Will jog away and turn the corner.