White Lies

Chapter 3

Notes: I'm so, so sorry for taking so long! Long story short, I basically have time to write only during the weekend and stuff came up on the last two ones, making me too busy to write. I hope it won't happen again!

Moving to more important things, I thank anybody who commented and/or voted. I hope you'll continue enjoying this!

Warnings: I don't have medical training, so there might be inaccuracies about this. Entire dialogues in italics mean that the characters are talking in a language different from English.

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Chapter Three

To say that Alfred F Jones was angry would have been an understatement. He was – completely livid. As he stormed through the corridor, his feet thumping loudly against the floor, he couldn't keep himself from replaying in his mind the previous minutes.

The thing was, Alfred wasn't stupid. He was far from it, and he had immediately suspected that there was something wrong with Matthew, aside from the obvious. But Matthew was even smarter than him. With his trembling lips and huge eyes, he was the perfect portrait of innocence. And Alfred inevitably fell for it. Every. Single. Time.

'Goddamnit, Mattie, why?'

Alfred clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. He felt like punching something, but there was nothing in the vicinity that could bear his strength.

Alfred only wanted the best for his younger brother. He wanted him to be happy and safe. Why couldn't Matthew see it?

And it hurt. Because Alfred had been so sure that Matthew trusted him... instead, it wasn't like that. He had been going on behind his back, and Alfred was starting to wonder how many times that had already happened. How much was Matthew hiding?

The worst thing was that Alfred couldn't understand why. He knew that his little brother was modest to a fault, that he didn't want to bother others with his problems. Not asking for help even when he desperately needed it was a perfectly normal behaviour, coming from Matthew. It was one of the reasons Alfred tried to keep a close eye on him, whenever he could.

But why would he keep lying after he had been discovered?! Why to him, especially.

Alfred couldn't delete from his mind the sight of Matthew's wan, horrified face when he had realized that his older brother had been listening to the conversation. The way he had kept trying to deny, in spite of having been just caught red-handed. While he had been about to tell Arthur everything.

It hurt more than Alfred could have imagined, an iron-grip squeezing his chest, because it meant only one thing: Matthew didn't trust him.

What made everything even more confusing – and in turn, intensified the pain tenfold – was that Alfred still had no clue of the reason. His mind was frantically running through the memories of all their conversations, the time spent together, trying to detect lost hints, but Alfred was completely sure that Matthew had never given any indication of not trusting him. Excluding the times they had been arguing, of course, but those didn't count, none of them actually meant what he said in those circumstances. Or did they? Alfred wasn't so sure anymore.

"Fuck this shit!" he swore loudly, swinging a fist through the air.

He wanted nothing more than going to a gym and working out against a punching bag until he was so exhausted that he could barely stand, but he was still wearing a formal suit and all his clothes were in his bedroom. With Matthew, who was the last person he wanted to see, at the moment.