interrupt

Bran is here.
Bran is here, loudly, bursting through the doors with the drama of the kinds of telenovelas you land on when you click through too many channels on hospital cable. 

And he's thinking about being in hospital because Bran is here, and he oughtn't be, because it's Ari's birthday, and because it's Ari's birthday he needs to be up somewhere far away mourning Arawn with Ceri, because Ari is not Arawn, because it makes Ceri too sad to think about, because their parents told her that he was a monster, because –

But Bran is here, not there.
Here, in Annwn, the otherworld away from the living, the lounge painstakingly decorated by the dead in celebration of a birth. Not up in the high tower of the Corporation building where Ceri practically lives now, haunted anywhere else by the dead and the missing, where they usually spend this day, mourning Arawn, whom Ari is not, because –

Well, Bran is here, bursting through the doors with a level of drama inappropriate for anyone who isn't the drunkard scion of the wealthiest corporation in the world. Or the middle sibling of any regular family.

Ari doesn't see Bran often. The last time, they made eye contact for a few seconds, passing each other in a hallway, and from what he knows they both had full-scale breakdowns in their own personal styles about it. So for a moment, he only sees Bran's face - anger and misery finally unmuted, blotching across his cheeks in ugly pinks - before he can figure out what Bran is holding.
Two boxes. One of them is familiar, a shoebox that has no reason to be anywhere but Ari's room, under the false bottom of his underwear drawer, stinking up the place with cherry blossoms.

The sight is enough to rip any confusion and joy from his chest and replace it with cold, numbing fear. 

(the cwn had joked, one time, about filling a bathtub with ari's cor. he imagines this is what that would have felt like.)

Bran is here; Bran has Ari's battered shoebox that’s full of Arawn's things, and pictures of Joel, and Jun's broken insert, and everything he should never have kept; Bran knows that Ari kept those things; Bran is angry.
Bran has never been angry with Ari before. Even when he was at his most frustrated with their parents for prioritizing the dying son over the living one, he's never directed that at Ari.
His eyes are reddened. He's been crying.
(of course he has, it's his dead brother's birthday.)
Ari is several times stronger than Bran, now. (ari is a monster) Still, he flinches away a little as Bran comes towards him.

Just a little, even as he realises that the insoles the Corporation makes him wear make him taller than the big brother that towered over his hospital beds, and the world tilts a little strangely.

Bran isn't moving quickly. Nothing to defend against, as if Ari could bear to hold his hands up against him and prove their parents right. Their sister, too.
He sets down what he's carrying (the golden-brown bear with its fur worn ragged, recorded voice barely a rattle of memory any more, sat on top with care) (it falls to lay down anyway, because bran's red-rimmed eyes (he's been crying) (of course he has) are trying so hard to stay on aris face, as if he can pin him in place with that alone) (he can) and continues, inexorably, towards Ari.

Bran pulls him into a hug. Tight - tighter than he'd have ever dared when he was alive and sick and his family still loved him - and Ari realises there's tightness in his throat, too, wet and heavy and pulling sharp at his eyes.

"Happy birthday, Arawn," Bran says, for the first time in years. "Sorry. She shouldn’t have done that." 

Everyone there hears it.