R U N E — 2005
— THEY SPEND THE WEEKEND AT AUNT CALLIE'S, just Nick, Adam, and Rune, with the unceasing rain to keep them all company. Bella calls him once on Saturday morning, just as the Buckleys are all about to jam themselves into their rattly beige Honda, to ask him about nearby jobs. He recommends asking Mike about his family's hiking shop, tells her to flirt a little if she must, which he then briskly translates into, 'just trip over and smile, that'll work'.
Bella and him never talk over the phone — brief updates in the truck are enough for them both — and he's eager to end the conversation. Not because he doesn't like her, but because he doesn't like the phone. And, he can admit, he might also loathe the niggling sensation he gets whenever they talk. Bella is profoundly boring in the same way Rune is, and sometimes when they speak, he gets this tense feeling that he needs to meet some social expectation because she won't do it for him. So, when Bella begins to clumsily hint at some dreadful beach trip, Rune hangs up. He even hurries his family along and into the car so that he can pretend he was pressed for time and had to urgently leave. Then he spends the weekend blissfully isolated, no parents or friends to speak of.
The remainder of Saturday is spent playing monopoly, because Callie doesn't use the TV in her cabin except in emergencies ('Boredom is an emergency!' Was Adam's reply), and they need to be frugal with the generator the residence runs off of. Sunday is much of the same. More monopoly, a puzzle they can't finish, with no dreams or lingering strangeness to speak of.
"I think I heard a wolf last night," Adam lights up with memory Sunday evening, and their aunt, a stout woman with the stature and presence of the teetering pines that surround them, spouts a series of legends she'd learned from some of the Quilette men on her hunting trips. Adam 'oo's and 'ah's at all the right moments, and Nick continues to pick at his fingernails, gaze absently drifting from the dark sky to the bug-zapper. Rune merely wonders at how close they are to the Cullens' house. From where they sit on the veranda, bacon sandwiches in hand, he imagines it's just a little way's uphill. If he squints into the thick sheet of rain drowning the surrounding wildlife, he can almost glimpse a brighter, warmer wood, like the panelling on the outside of their big house. Then the zapper goes off and he flinches away from the thoughts again, swats Nick's picking fingers apart again, tries to gauge the time from the odd lighting that comes with thick rain — where day becomes night, but night becomes nothing.
"Do you think," Nick starts, voice wheezy and hoarse from disuse, from his low volume. Along the veranda, on separate stools, Adam and Callie pick through boxes of fishhooks and animal snares. This leaves the two of them alone on one swinging porch bench, with the zapper and the creaking drains and the rain thundering down on the tin roof. It's serene, tranquil, like sitting on the edge of a dark, misty lake. Ominous to a stranger, home to a friend.
"Would you think it's wrong, if—" And Rune is patient, because his mum was patient with him the first time he tried to squeeze out the words, mouth slipping around the words 'I like a boy' like trying to stick a needle in a stone and draw blood.
"Sometimes," he tries once more, still in that crackling little whisper, "I feel more like a girl than a boy. And I don't think that's right."
He's hunched on the floral cushions of the bench, staring at the great streams of water coming off the roof and soaking the very edge of the porch fencing. Like he's willing the words back into his mouth — or better yet, banishing them into the din of the rainstorm.
"Sometimes what's wrong for others is right for you." Rune replies, after a great deal of consideration. He tries to think of what his mother had told him, but this isn't the same situation. It doesn't feel right, what falls off his tongue, but he hopes it's enough. "All that really matters is that it's right for you, that you feel comfortable, like yourself." Nick leans into him a little, but stays tightly crunched around his knees, like a clam that's sealed shut, or a pistachio shell with no split to pry apart.
"But it's still wrong." His younger sibling mutters, a surprising degree of heat in his voice. Rune sighs through his nose, thins his lips and presses them into the neck of his Washington State hoodie. The cream edges are going threadbare and off-coloured from years of use, making it look perpetually unclean. His hands wrap around each other in the pouch pocket, and he tries to stir up those dredges of shame, of hate, of guilt, he must've felt when he realised that every boy aside from him seemed to have a crush on Chrissy from across the street or Rebecca the Volleyball Captain. He wonders where all those complicated feelings went, how he got them to dissipate, if they ever did, ever would. Or if it was more like dislodging the loose sediment at the bottom of a stream — a poke of a stick and suddenly the clear water went gritty and brown. Like waiting for the dirt to sink again, displaced.
"Wrong for someone else, maybe. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be yourself. Living for the peace of others, but feeling horrible in yourself... that's not a way to be." He thinks of Callie, of himself, both pressed to the fringes for something as simple as who they are. He worries, even as he says it, that he's enabling hate, that he's letting his own jaded outlook tarnish someone else's, someone as young and sheltered as Nick. Young and sheltered, but still so exposed to the casual disdain of their community; like a fox cub hiding in a den, but still too close to the exit, chilled by the frost that creeps in.
He pulls out a chilled hand and tucks it around his brother's head, into the slightly greasy blond mop of hair, and pretends to not notice any unsteady breaths or hasty scrubbing of eyes. "Nick, no one else should get a say in what you do. It's your life, not theirs. It's hard, but you've got to not give a shit, sometimes."
Nick laughs, quiet, subdued, like always. Rune wonders if there was ever an excited little kid in him, if it was there long before Nick joined their family, if something tied and bound that child and jammed it into a locked room.
"How? You don't care about what other people say, ever."
Rune snorts, pulls the other into a hug he otherwise wouldn't initiate. "Yeah, I'm cool like that." But that's also not true, he thinks. He'd only found a way to live around others, wedging himself into the slim spaces like a parasite, hissing and spitting and flinching away whenever faced with the warmth and noise of another, like two wrong magnets repelling each other.
"We'll go shopping." He says, instead of anything else he should say, anything that might make it better. "I'll drive us out to Port Angeles, and we can get you clothes. I'll even do your make-up, if that's what you want."
He thinks it might be too soon an offer, too hasty, too much. Like a well-intended touch that lands right on a raw wound. But Nick nods anyway.
"Can you even do make-up?" He asks, and there's a teasing lilt to his voice that Rune is more familiar with, and he's suddenly foisted back into common territory. He tussles his brother's hair and shakes him about in the swinging bench like they always have and says, "Of course I can, every gay can!" Before he even realises he's said it. And the nice thing is Nick doesn't say a thing, and Callie laughs at him from across the porch because he was too loud, and Adam squawks something about Rune never plucking his eyebrows like he'd promised so Callie goes off to find Rune some tweezers so he can follow up on it.
The easy acceptance isn't unexpected but also isn't anticipated, and it seems like that little slip up, Rune's spontaneous and entirely accidental admittance, is the thing he should've said to Nick all along, because when their parents come to collect them, dad mumbling about driving in dangerous weather, Adam chatting in the backseat with mum and Nick, it occurs to Rune that the car hasn't felt like such a gentle place in a very long time.
*
— RUNE HAD BEEN OKAY FOR SO LONG. Months, a year even, since his last relapse. It was bound to happen, really. Long overdue.
Now, see, the tricky thing about Rune's delicate status as a Schizo is that he doesn't really function in the way one typically would. He'd gone through the typical process — taken Chlorpromazine until his skin got dry and itchy and his jaw started locking and then when his mother and his doctors all conspired over his sullen, inattentive mood, he got stuck on Clozapine instead. He took the drugs, he did the therapy (both the family therapy and the CBT, psychosis edition), but even then his status was a little tenuous. The doctors were never quite sure if he'd been diagnosed with the right thing, no matter how many he saw, because he just didn't act right.
Hallucinations were a common part of his life, but he just didn't get as taken in with them as he was meant to. He didn't experience delusions in the same way, either — he didn't think the government was tracking him, or that he was secretly a God, or that his family were plotting to kill him. He'd felt like he was doing everything wrong for years until the moment where his psychiatrist at the time, Dr. McLadden, had gently escorted his mother out of the office, sat himself back down opposite fourteen-year-old Rune, and softly asked;
"Does she confuse you a lot, your mum?"
Rune had looked up from his biology homework, a little perplexed, and said, "Everyone confuses me, it's not just her."
"Well," Dr. McLadden shuffled about in his seat like a rather long-necked bird ruffling it's feathers, "Usually in cases like yours, we've found that the mother can set things off — an activating event, if you will. Mothers are very partial to what's called a double-bind statement. Does your mum ever say something, but it seems like she means or wants something else?"
"Like what?" Rune had asked, roughly scratching out an incorrectly labelled plant cell and only half humouring the man. He never really cared for what his psychiatrists said, especially since his mother was the one who asked about all their jargon and nonsense, but they did occasionally have a little bit of interesting insight.
"An example would be if your mum said 'You look nice today, I hate the other clothes you wear'. See, because you can't quite decide whether she thinks you look nice or if she actually hates how you normally look. It's especially confusing if you're Schizophrenic because you already have trouble differentiating reality, and double-bind statements make it worse."
For all his sexism, Dr. McLadden was onto something, and Rune felt a little bit more normal, a bit more acceptable, maybe even proud that he was finally acting how he was supposed to. Because his mother did confuse him and it did upset him, and when he was upset he tended to hear and see things more often.
They'd addressed it in family therapy and things had been okay for a long time. Whenever his mind drifted, whenever an aura started to rise around his head, he never had a double-bind to blame. Although, that meant he never had anything else to blame. But now there was a sure-fire thing that could set him off.
Occasionally he wondered if he should do that on purpose to see what one of his hallucinations would tell him. Much more rarely, and more shamefully, Rune felt lonely enough he really considered trying just for someone to talk to.
Today was different, though. He hadn't been able to take Luna out that afternoon because they'd got stuck in traffic trying to get out of the school parking lot. Bella had been huffing about the Cullens' silver Volvo cutting her off, and then a third unwanted boy had asked her to the spring dance, shiftily flicking his eyes between Bella and Rune. They'd stopped off to grab gas station snacks and Rune devoured a bag of cheese puffs while Bella waved her packet of strawberry twists and asked him for what had to be the eighth time that Rune 'definitely, one-hundred-percent' saw Edward with her when the car accident happened.
The change in routine had made him feel strangely fragile. Dad and Nick were out in Port Angeles, watching Adam's first ice hockey game of the season. It's just him and mum — a dynamic he only vaguely remembers enjoying, now. Too much dysfunction and miscommunicated overshadowing the nice parts.
He knows she hates to be alone in the house though, that it's only a matter of time before she calls him down and gets frustrated when he doesn't immediately do something helpful. Now Rune's tearing up lettuce (he isn't allowed to use knifes, not anymore) and his mother is talking about universities. She wants him to leave, that much is clear, but she doesn't think he'll manage well on his own. She wants him gone, and she wants him to never leave. She thinks he'll be okay, she thinks he'll fall apart. And his brain is screaming it, the words bright like a neon yellow sign surrounded by police tape and flashing blue lights, 'double-bind, double-bind!'.
"I need to take Luna out," he rasps, head going tight and blurry and the buzz of the kitchen appliances is getting louder, louder, and his mum's confused yell fades into the distance as he tears through the overgrown rose bushes that never flower anymore and bolts round to the front of Charlie's house, then past it, through the garden of the house at the end of the cul-de-sac and into the woods, sloping down a gentle incline, further, further, until the buzzing pops into a steady screeching whine like the sound of a lightbulb right before it burns out. His head feels out of tune, like a radio on an unknown frequency, and he runs, faster, faster, until the tree trunks are just blurs and he thinks, distantly, that if he tripped now he'd rip something out, shatter something important.
Hunt, he remembers that phantom beckoning, and suddenly his hearing tunes back in, catching on the steady bump of a pulse. His hands shake, his head roars again not with electricity but with blood, and his hands claw into the nearest tree, the soft bark splitting into thready strands of warm caramel brown. Something will get me out of this, he thinks, a little desperately. His skin feels too warm, fury filling him at the heat, the life in his skin.
I'm not meant to be here without them, something hisses deep inside his head. He yanks at his hair; it's too short. He tugs at his beloved hoodie; it's too tight. He rips it over his head and drops it; the loved thing catches on a gathering of twigs and thorns that creep around a fallen tree. He can hear a river rushing nearby and suddenly all he wants is to be in the water again, so he marches for it, lumbering gracelessly though the undergrowth.
Underwater. Burning, venom, crystalline pain and agony and hunger. Bloodlust. Rune's head goes underwater and he sees, briefly, a red Hawaiian shirt and green-tinged skin, purple-almost-black capri-pants and legs kicking, a delicate ankle tearing away from the surface, black eyes; black underwater and lightless and soulless and so, so sad. He sees Lucifer swept away in the Acheron, a boy with bright eyes and dark hair and a cruel, curling lip snarling at a pretty blond man who huddles over a limp, wheezing body — he hears crying and wet, greedy sounds and shallow breathing, and all of it is so much like the roots reaching into the river, like the sharp bed of rock and silt. He can't bear to hold onto any of it and so when his head breaches the water's surface again he stops trying to cling to the sides and lets himself get pulled further along the river, lets its sonorous shushing silence every word and thought. His body seems stuck between floating and sinking, the sky above is a slice of dim grey, the sheer river bank a dark wall on either side. Things are settling inside him again and he feels stupid and terrible and cruel and infuriatingly confused.
The river widens and peters into something calmer, and although he's still in the middle of it all, too far from the banks than his tired body can bear, he thinks things may be ok again.
He turns his body upright and it sinks to the riverbed. The floor spits up plumes of dust and sediment with each weighted step and his lungs no longer gasp for breath and he finds himself on the riverbank, torso hunched over knees, white t-shirt and jeans plastered to his skin, not even shivering but so so cold.
When Sam Uley finds him he's pealing off his shirt and upturning his boots, watching numbly as water pours out. The world is a green-tinged monochrome of sharply inclining trees and slate beaches and black river.
"You fall in?" He grunts, standing on stiff legs beside Rune's stone cold form and taking a deep inhale of the chilled evening air.
"My head felt loud so I jumped in." Across the river, a blond woman clutching a cream hoodie slinks away from the water and back between the trees, though Rune doesn't notice. Him and Sam are entirely alone.
"Ah," Sam's shoulders roll back and he flops down beside Rune with a loud clattering of the slate beach and a big huff. He briefly claps Rune's shoulder, so hot he winces and jolts away. A light snow begins to fall and Rune breathes a sigh of relief.
"I can get that. Done it a few times myself."
Rune never knows how to feel about Sam. He's nice in his own way; gruff, devoted, blunt. He'd always understood where they were with each other until Sam abruptly began isolating himself a year ago, and since then he'd never been very sure. He'd stopped joining Charlie when he visited the Rez around the time that Jacob started acting strange in his presence — uncomfortable in a way things between them had never been, like he sensed something wrong but couldn't put a name to it.
Sam and him used to be okay, though. They'd even kissed once, a funny half-joke rush of a kiss on New Years Eve, right at midnight and in front of all the other Rez kids. Rune was sure Leah would skin him alive, but things were okay, normal. Sam flirted for a bit, then vanished entirely. Jake found it funny until he started backing off too.
"I don't think this is mental illness, what I have. I don't even think something's wrong with me anymore. I don't know what to think."
Sam lets out another big heave of air, cloud falling from his lips. He doesn't touch Rune again, but he shifts like he wants to throw his arm over his shoulders like he used to.
"I get that too. For a while I thought I was going insane. Spent two weeks thinking I'd hit my head and lost my mind." Sam looks at Rune at last. There's warmth in his dark eyes and Rune is struck with how much maturing he's done in the year since they'd last spoke. He's huge; broad and muscular in a way that makes his head look too small. Almost as tall as Rune's spindly height.
"What happened?"
Sam winces. "Can't really say. A lot, I guess. Turns out I wasn't who I thought I was."
Rune lets out a contemplative hum, allowing the cold breeze to creep over his shoulders and through the fine hair on his arms like an icy caress. A part of him wants to cry for answers: he can feel something contemptuous and affectionate breeding in his chest when he casts his mind to the furnace-hot body beside his and how it had felt to have his lips pressed chastely against Sam's when he was shorter and chubbier. How his laugh felt falling into someone else's smile.
"The new thing I became, though... it's nice. I feel better this way. Like maybe I wasn't properly myself before, and it took me changing a lot to see the truth." He pulls his shirt over his head and deposits it in Rune's trembling hands. The fabric is thin but warm, smelling like campfires.
"You'll be okay."
When Sam says it, it feels like a command, a promise, an oath. The words that never help finally feel like a comfort, like a solution. Rune pulls the shirt over his head, feels through his dripping wet hair, and pulls himself up.
He holds his soaked shoes and shirt in hand and follows Sam down the river to La Push, then onto the Rez. Charlie flounders, throwing down his winning deck of playing cards, and bundles him first into his fur-lined jacket, then one of Billy Black's plaid blankets, then into his arms. Rune breathes in the scent of Charlie — fire and sweat and fabric softener and shaving cream. It's exactly what he needs; someone to press his shaking hands around, a calloused hand smoothing down his hair and tucking him in close and tight.
Rune's throat feels thick — a sudden absence in his chest he didn't realise was there until it was so sharply felt that it took every breath away. He always held Adam and Nick like this, and his mother and father held him like this. That family hold, the ancient feeling of pack, clan, unity.
It's been so long.
When Charlie gets him home the quiet tears have dried on his cheeks. Rune's mum and dad are standing in the cold under the light of their porch and he's gathered close to them the moment he's out of the car, Charlie's hand on his back. He can almost taste his parents' melancholy it's so thick in the air, but he can't quite understand it until they're inside and he's fresh out of the shower and in his bed, four blankets over his comforter and stuck in a skin that just won't warm. His mum is smoothing back his hair like he's a child with a fever and his harebrained dad is making tea downstairs, clattering about. Nick and Adam are sleeping in the same room tonight, they tell him.
"I'm so sorry," he says, and his voice sounds so much sadder than he feels. Virginia Buckley sucks in a sharp breath and gasps out;
"No! Rune, baby, don't apologise." Her hands clutch his own and she shuffles onto his bed beside him like he's five again.
"My sweet boy, this is our fault. Mine, really. You had an episode and we've made you feel like that's not allowed." Rune shrugs like he's trying to roll the uncomfortable truth off his shoulders and out the door.
"We used to be so close, Rune. You're my world. Don't tell the others but you are. My first, my baby." Her murky eyes are blue and washed out, glassy and aged and tired. Rune can almost glimpse all the past that she's never told him.
"I've been so— so obsessed— with trying to help that I got lost. I've ruined this. I made you feel like this and I don't know how to fix it but instead of even trying I just kept on the same path. From now on you're in charge, okay? It's your life, your brain, your feelings. I'll butt out. And maybe we can try build some trust up again. And sweetness," her hand is small on his cheek now, the years between now and the last time she held his face so gently yawning out between them like a chasm, "I will always love you. I'm not going to say there's nothing wrong with you 'cus we're all a little wrong. But you're not broken for it. You're still smart, still sweet, still kind. Nothing can take that from you — it's who you are." Then she kisses his head and he flops his head into her neck so that her arms will wrap around his head like they used to.
His dad comes up, pulls the sheets further in around him and leaves a plate of cherry jam toast and a cup of tea on his bedside, a hand pressing the crown of his head. They leave and Rune eats, drinks, mourns his Washington State hoodie, then thinks resolutely that it may be about time he starts wearing the other clothes in his wardrobe anyway.
— DEADENED MOMENTS, MAKE ME STILL.
Inspired by my frustratingly sexist psychology classes, a huge fight I had with my mum over universities, our relatively unhealthy co-dependency, and the good parents who actually acknowledge their wrongs and apologise. I love my mum and I'm still pissed off. Also sorry, it's been a while. I have mock exams next week and an art deadline the week after, but I am persisting!!
How're we liking things at the moment? Sorry it's not super informative, this is more of an 'emotional resolution' chapter. Turning point for Rune's attitude and behaviour etc, more motivation. Also, Sam Uley!! I'm still trying to come up with ways to integrate the wolfies in but this was fairly spontaneous and I like it!