Danny got sick in the winter of Sid's fourth year.
It started as the kind of sickness that was ordinary in the Ash — a fever, a cough, the hot forehead and glassy eyes that came with a season change and usually resolved in a week with warmth and rest. Nina made the broth she always made. She sat with him through the nights. She pressed cool cloths to his forehead in the careful, steady way of someone who has no other tools but is going to use this one completely.
Sid watched from his side of the room.
He was not unconcerned — he noted the fever's trajectory with the detached attention of someone who recognises an adverse development. But he was not frightened. Children got sick in the Ash. Most of them recovered. The ones who didn't were usually the very youngest, or the ones whose bodies were already weakened by sustained malnutrition, and Danny was neither of those. He had Nina's stubbornness and the specific physical resilience of a child who had been loved consistently.
Danny would be fine.
This was what Sid told himself on the first day, and the third, and the fifth.
On the seventh day Danny stopped improving.
The fever had broken and returned twice, which Yusuf — who came on the fourth day at Nina's request — had said might happen and said again might pass. But on the seventh day the cough deepened into something that lived in Danny's chest rather than his throat, and his breathing changed in a way that was audible from across the room, and Nina's face, which had been carefully calm throughout, took on an expression that Sid had not seen on it before.
Fear. Real fear. Unconcealed.
Yusuf came again. He was quiet for a long time after examining Danny. Then he spoke to Nina in the corner of the room, too low for Sid to hear clearly, and Nina listened with her arms crossed tight across her chest and nodded twice and then Yusuf left and the room was different after he left, charged with something that had no name but that Sid's extensive experience of adult emotional states told him was very bad.
"What did he say?" Sid asked.
Nina looked at him. He had spoken — actually spoken, requesting information — with a directness that surprised her; he so rarely asked for things. She looked at him for a moment and then said, carefully: "Danny needs medicine that we don't have right now. We're going to find a way to get it."
'What kind of medicine."
Sid asked
"What kind."
She told him. The name meant nothing to him — he didn't have Yusuf's knowledge. But the cost she mentioned next meant something. It was a number. He calculated instantly what their household could generate toward that number, running through every resource he knew they had, and the answer came back wrong.
They couldn't cover it. Not this week. Not this month.
He sat with this calculation and Nina sat with her own version of it across the room, and Danny breathed the new breathing between them, and the winter went on outside the thin walls.
Nina went to every person she knew who had anything.
She was not a woman who asked for things. She had been giving for years — the community kitchen deliveries, the small loans of food and time she extended to neighbours without accounting, the steady generosity of someone who has very little and shares it anyway. People knew this about her. They wanted to help.
They didn't have enough either.
The Ash was not a place where people had reserves. The resources that circulated within it were the resources of people living at the margin, and the margin didn't accommodate emergencies of this scale. What came back to Nina was love and sorrow and small insufficient amounts that together still fell short.
Sid watched her go out each morning and come back each evening with less hope in her face than she'd left with, and he watched Danny, and he calculated, and he found no solution.
He was four years old.
He had observed and mapped and catalogued this world for four years with the cold, strategic precision of Marcus Hale, and he had no relationships in it, no resources in it, no standing in it, because he had spent four years treating it as a temporary inconvenience rather than a life. He had information — accurate, detailed, more comprehensive than anyone expected from a four-year-old — and he had no way to turn it into what Danny needed.
This was the first time in his life — either of his lives — that Sid understood the word 'useless' from the inside.
He sat in the corner of the room and watched his mother go out again into the cold and watched his brother breathe the new way and understood, with the specific precision that he brought to all understanding, exactly what his four years of detachment had cost him.
He had been in this life. He just hadn't lived in it.
And now he couldn't get back the four years he'd spent waiting for it to become something worth living in.
Danny called his name on the fourteenth night.
Not loudly. He didn't have loudly anymore. Just "Sid"— soft, certain, the way you say the name of someone you expect to be there.
Sid was awake. He was always awake now, sleeping only in fragments, the rest of the night spent listening to Danny's breathing and counting the intervals between breaths and knowing, with the part of him that knew things before he was ready to know them, what the intervals meant.
He crossed the room and sat beside Danny's mattress.
Danny's eyes were open. They had the half-focused quality of someone who is between states — not quite here, not quite elsewhere, resting in the space between. He looked at Sid and something in his face settled, the way things settle when they find what they were looking for.
"Cold," Danny said.
Sid lay down beside him. Put his arm around him. Danny was very warm — the fever's last insistence — but the warmth was different from what warmth should feel like, thin and desperate rather than solid. Sid held him anyway.
"Better", Danny said.
They lay like that for a long time. Sid didn't speak. He had nothing to say that was adequate and he had inherited from somewhere he couldn't identify, the understanding that inadequate words were worse than silence in certain moments.
Danny's breathing slowed.
Sid felt it happen — felt the intervals lengthen, felt the quality of the warmth change again, felt the small body beside him become less present in some way that had no physical explanation but was completely unmistakable.
"Danny," he said.
No answer.
"Danny,"
The breathing stopped just before dawn. The room was very quiet. Through the thin walls the Ash was beginning its morning, the standpipe starting its first run, someone somewhere already moving, the city that never entirely slept beginning its daily restart.
Sid lay beside his brother in the growing light and did not move.
He had spent four years not caring about this life. He had spent four years treating Danny's affection as an irritation and the Ash as a temporary purgatory and Nina's tiredness as an operational problem and all of it — all of it — as something to be endured until he could get back to the real business of being the person he considered himself to be.
And now Danny was gone, and the four years were gone, and what Sid held was the specific, crushing weight of a person who has wasted something irreplaceable.
He had not loved Danny. He had not let himself. And Danny, who had put a smooth stone in his hand and asked for nothing, who had sat beside him on the step watching the lane in comfortable silence, who had said his name in the dark and trusted he would come — Danny had loved him anyway.
Without deserving it, without earning it, without doing anything to generate it beyond being present and breathing, Sid had been loved.
He lay in the growing light and held his brother and understood, for the first time in two lives, what he had been doing wrong.
Everything.
He had been doing everything wrong.