It happens at four in the morning on a Sunday. It happens at four in the morning but Patrick doesn’t wake up (which is wrong because he should wake up, he should know) until noon, when the light hits the chink in his blinds and slaps his eyes open.

Noon is late. He is late, so he stumbles through Cheerios and a shower and clothes and down stairs and he is almost at the door when he hears his name and his father’s voice and something in it makes him slow down.

“Dad?”

“Son.”

“What is it?”

It’s quiet in the living room and the curtains are closed (which is wrong because his mother always opens them when she gets up and even though she went out last night she would have gotten up early) so it’s dark and the shadows of his father and his brothers are looming against the opposite wall.

“Patrick, Sean… Jamie… boys.”

“What is it dad?”

“Last night. There was an… something happened.”

Patrick makes a small noise in his throat and beside him, his younger brother crawls into his older brother’s lap. He is still late and he’s always late and promised to try harder so he gets up and runs, runs from the room all the way to Nick’s house so that his chest burns and the wind tears layers from his eyes like an onion. It occurs to him that maybe all of these people – the businessmen he dodges and the women he ploughs into and the children he shoves out of his way – have been running like this before or will soon, and then it occurs to him that maybeprobablydefinitely they haven’t and no one else has felt anything quite like the pressure behind the bridge of Patrick’s nose.

He stops running when he reaches the patch of grass outside Nick’s house, when he sits down and tries to still his heart and make it slow or stop. It hurts; it hurts a lot in his throat and his stomach and his legs and his heart, and he thinks about that because he knows that his heart is only pumping the (rushing red dripping, breaking glass - was it on the windshield?) blood but if that’s true then why does it hurt like there is something burrowing inside and clawing and growing and groping until one day Patrick will collapse like dust.

But he is still late and he draws strength that he does not have to fall against the door and it is cold against his cheek: normal cold, not the cold there is everywhere else all of a sudden.

Nick opens the door and says his name and some other stuff about late, and how useless they are without a singer, and how does he expect them to get anywhere if he isn’t dedic- but the look in Patrick’s eyes or mouth or hands stops him and suddenly Patrick is on his knees.

Hands and shoulders are pulling him up and his name over and over and someone’s arm warm around him and the world around him dulls and swings into focus and his throat tightens (what does metal sound like when it submits?) and someone (but it is Jack) calls him Trick.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

There aren’t words, or if there are Patrick has never heard them before and he remembers that Jack is a year older than him and maybe that year is what it takes to learn to speak?

His heart is gone, now, and the clawing and the groping is spreading to his arms and his legs and his eyes and it takes all he has to mumble something about Mother and car crash and dead and(did it hurt?) then he is crying crying crying and Jack is holding him tight and telling him Oh Trick I’m So Sorry and It’ll Be All Right and We’ll Take Care Of You. Patrick remembers when he was seven and his mother took Jamie and left for a week and his father locked himself up for two whole days and Sean told him, I’ll Take Care Of You, but then their father came out and it turned out even big brothers aren’t invincible.

He is still cryingshakingsweatingsobbing and Jack’s shoulder is damp and warm and We’ll Take Care Of You and then the clawing and the groping moves to his stomach and he is flying from the room and clutching porcelain (it’s that cold that is familiar and comforting) and liquid pain and blood and brown is coming from inside him and is this what it feels like to die?