#sometimes getting better just means recognising allt he things that aren't actively making you worse for a while

[thisstableground]

Thank you so much for being one of like 3 people on the internet who writes docs with Ruben in them!!! Could you write fluff with Ruben making breakfast?

[This isn’t fluff! I apologise! It was supposed to be but it turned into Ruben in a bittersweet but not unhappy introspection about four months into his recovery, having a nourishing breakfast with a side of slow but steady emotional healing. So, y’know, classic thisstableground content. Warning for PTSD things, implied past suicidal thoughts, and also for some kinda disordered eating talk.]

Also on AO3!

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Ruben had always been under the impression that near death experiences were supposed to come with new appreciation of the life you almost lost. He had a whole run of them and only came away with a blurred recollection of what now feels like someone else’s rescue: he doesn’t remember having to be sedated for the plane back, or arriving at a Philadelphia hospital that thankfully wasn’t Independence Memorial. He doesn’t remember seeing his family again for the first time in months. The earliest thing he can recall from his return is that Ma was the one who was there to stop him when he tried to tear out his own IV and make a break for it.

“The doctor said you have to stay here for just a little while, sweetheart,” she’d explained, as he begged her to let him leave. “You’ve lost too much weight, and you have a fever. They want to make sure you’re going to be okay before you come back home.”

He remembers thinking, I’m never going to be okay. But they treated him for dehydration, fed him gritty-textured nutrition shakes and hospital food he had no appetite for till he started to put on weight again, put him on antibiotics for the infection from poorly-cared for wounds that had hit him with the fever, and after a few weeks they let him go back to live with his ma.

Near death hasn’t gifted him with a new lease on life so far. At best he’s been having life pushed on him while he passively lets it happen. When he wakes up hours before everyone else, he lies there with the day a vast, black expanse of vacuum and inside himself the same expanse, and wants to go back to sleep forever. Ma is the one who makes him get up, knocks on his locked door in the morning and tells him that she’s made breakfast so he needs to come downstairs and eat before she leaves. She does’t believe him when he says he eats while she’s at work, which is fair. He didn’t at first. Hunger has just been the background noise of consciousness for a long enough time he forgot what it meant.

From those early days he remembers her trying to grasp his thin wrist gently in one hand, and how she looked when he shied away from her touch, and her voice tearfully saying, “look at yourself, cariño, there’s almost nothing left of you”.  He remembers thinking, good. If there’s nothing left of him then there’s nothing anyone can take from him. If he’s nothing but hollow no matter what, then what could hungry even mean any more?

But he’d eat, only because it was easier than lying to Ma about it, and because it was easier than making her cry again. And life pushed on him pushes him to live: he goes to therapy. He exists. He wakes up in the morning, every morning, even though there’s nothing to wake up to when the trial in April is over, the now what of May and June.

In July he wakes up, and thinks about lying here all day, and thinks about the gnawing feeling of unfilled space echoing around his body, and thinks, I want arroz con leche.

What? Jesus. When was the last time he wanted anything?

Breakfast sounds…good, though. Good enough that it seems too long to wait for Ma to get up in an hour. Even though he’s got nothing but time it’s somehow a lot harder to let the minutes slip by when there’s actually something he could do about what he wants, so after fidgeting around restlessly for a while he gives into it and unlocks his door. Crouches at the top of the stairs to peek through the railings into the living room below, like he used to in their first house in Philadelphia when he was eavesdropping on Ma having whispered disagreements with his father about Ruben when they thought that he was sleeping.

Nobody in the living room, or in the dining room when he tiptoes down there. He leans around the doorway of the kitchen, nobody in there. Ground floor cleared for safety he can relax some, putting the rice and cinnamon sticks on to boil and opening a can of condensed milk to add later. As he’s taking a bowl out of the cupboard, he realises that when he woke up feeling empty his first thought was that’s probably because I’m hungry not that’s because I wish I was dead. He drops the bowl on the counter in shock: it clatters loudly but doesn’t break.

“Shit!” he curses, gripping the edge of the bowl tightly and trying not to let the sound fling him into fight-or-flight, and then repeats “shit,” when he hears the sound of a door opening on the floor above and then footsteps down the stairs. Ma’s room is above the kitchen. She must have heard him.

“It’s only me, Ma,” he calls softly.

“Rubén?” She comes to the kitchen. “¿Estás bien?”

“Sí, just dropped a bowl.”

“You’re up very early,” she says. Ruben’s pretty sure she means, you’re up at all?

“I’m making arroz con leche. You can go back to bed, it’s okay.”

“Do you need any help?”

“I got it.” Don’t be irritated. It’s a reasonable question. Still, he’s glad that she leaves the room instead of watching him, though he pauses to hear her footsteps and can tell she hasn’t gone back upstairs. She’s probably listening out for him from the living room. Don’t be irritated at that, either.

The rice simmers gently releasing cinnamon-scented steam and Ruben dips a finger into the can of condensed milk to taste it while he waits. Arroz con leche reminds him of sick days off school: insisting he needed to go in to stay on top of his work, but secretly relieved when Ma refused because it meant being able to stay in the quiet, just him and the one person he could always rely on, the way he’d always preferred things to be. She’d cook the rice while he went upstairs to bring his quilt and a pillow down to the sofa and then when he was tucked in comfortably she’d bring him a bowlful, that comforting mixture of warm and spiced and sweet but still bland enough to be easy to eat when he had no appetite. He’d feed spoonfuls from his own bowl to Paola and Mercedes when they were babies too, his way of letting them know sick days used to be for just me and Mamá, but it’s okay that you’re here now too.

When it’s ready he dishes out two bowls, puts raisins on Ma’s but not his own. Makes two coffees, both black with cinnamon, and takes one bowl and one mug on a tray into the living room. Ma is sitting on the sofa in her bathrobe, absent-mindedly pencilling answers into the newspaper crossword.

“Desayuno,” he says, putting the tray down on the coffee table.

“Oh, gracias,” she says, putting a hand over her heart. “What a nice surprise.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise for him to do something so simple as this for her, he thinks. He stands for a minute watching as she sets her newspaper down and picks up the tray. When he was growing up she always used to watch the news in the morning but they don’t do that any more after half the local news was him for so long. Ruben might be old news now but they still don’t watch it: there’s enough sadness in their lives without having to learn the sadness of the rest of the world too. What does she do to fill the time before work instead? Does she do the crossword every day? Does she sit in the stillness of the early hours listening out for him and the girls, trying to anticipate what kind of morning they might have? Psyching herself up to pull him out of his room to come eat, dreading how difficult he’ll make it for her today, and all while she’s got her actual job to go to afterwards. Does she think about him staying home from school when he was little too, and wonder like he does if he’ll be here in a second childhood forever, long after the girls grow up, just Ruben and her and long, quiet, empty days?

She didn’t sign up for this. She must think it, but she never says it to his face, never lets it show. He leans in to give her a tentative kiss on the cheek, and says, “I love you, Mamá.” It comes out a little pitiful.

“I love you too, cariño,” she says, patting his wrist. “Don’t forget to eat your own breakfast, now.”

In the kitchen, he covers the rest of the rice over so that the girls can have it when they wake up, and contemplates going to eat next to Ma on the couch or maybe the dining room, but instead end up sitting on the kitchen counter by the window because that’s the best spot at this time of day. The sun’s just coming up, spilling in clear and luminant across the windowsill. He’s always said Ma has a perfect spot to grow herbs there, but she’s never got round to doing it. Maybe he’ll do it for her one day, when he’s more certain of his ability to take care of something consistently. Maybe one day he’ll even have a place of his own again, a nice bright little kitchen full of herbs, drinking coffee and—no, that’s too much to think about for now. For now, he’s having breakfast on the counter in the growing sunlight by the window in his mother’s kitchen, and that has to be enough. Alive enough to remember that he can do nice things for other people, alive enough to remind his family that he loves them. He remembered how to feel that, if nothing else. He remembered how to make arroz con leche like Ma used to and that cinnamon and sweet and warm are all things that he can still feel good about. He isn’t ready to be happy that he’s alive yet. But at this particular moment, he’s glad he isn’t dead. That will have to be enough.