Reach out for the Sun [UsUk]

Eight: To Shake Off the Worry

Alfred couldn't sleep well that night.

Earlier happenings bothered him to an extreme, so he just lay on his back in the dark, staring at the emptiness above him that was the ceiling. 
Why was Matthew crying after receiving a phone call?
Why did he suddenly become so affectionate, told him he loved him?
And most importantly, why didn't he want to tell him the reason for the tears?

The only answer he received was 'We're going to the hospital, and you're signing a paper. It's nothing serious.'

Ah, but it must had been serious if it made him cry. Alfred wasn't stupid, unlike some people thought.

So many questions were spinning around in his mind, but he couldn't connect them to a logical answer. 

I don't know. He told me I'll find it all out the next morning, but why couldn't he just tell me right there? It made him cry, after all! It's something serious about my health, isn't it?

Dammit, I hate sleepless nights. I'm a wreck in the morning anyway, I don't need this on top of everything. 

What if it's actually something about Arthur?
Oh god, if I lose Arthur I would not be able to go on. I think that would be my breaking point number two. 

Hah, I'm not so sure if I'm glad my first attempt didn't work out well. Perhaps it'd be better if it did. Now it seems as if I keep causing more trouble to the people around me.

What's with all the falling? I really don't know. It's making me confused. I mean, I was always clumsy, but... I swear, if I drop my phone one more time, I'm throwing both the phone and myself through the window. It's getting annoying.

After a while, he decided to embrace it. It was going to be a long, miserable sleepless night, but he was going to hold it out.

Oh, he wasn't the only one having troubles with his mind.

Across the hall, in the tidiest bedroom known to humanity, Matthew was tossing and turning underneath the bedsheets, shaking because of the sudden, overwhelming cold his anxiety had caused him. He could forget sleep for tonight, and was only able to focus on the existential struggles surrounding him.

Alfred. 

Something was wrong with him. He had always known that, but always tried to convince himself that it was nothing or that it would go away soon.
But he remembered his younger brother struggling to walk at age six, he remembered the bittersweet memory from the park in Philadelphia - when Alfred fell face down onto the grass, rolled around and started laughing... Any other child would cry,  but the boy wouldn't want to cause problems to other people.
And their mother picked him up from the ground, dusting him off and sighing at how adorable that was for her. She couldn't spot a concern. Her boys were always happy, smiling, the cheerfulness visible in their eyes.

Now they were both being enslaved by life, coping unhealthily with each of their major problems. Matthew couldn't help but burst into tears.

He missed the days when they were just kids, careless and when everything was much simpler. He wished that he and Alfred could go back to spending time with their family in Philadelphia. He wanted their mother to be alive, and father to be happy, and everything to come together... But that was never going to happen.
He was, unfortunately, the one to cling to the past at all times. Unlike Alfred, who had more of a futuristic mindset, thinking about the what if it happens rather than the it happened, why doesn't it happen again. And those thoughts had a tendency of making him miserable at the most unexpected times of day.

And when there was nothing left but the infinity of tears staining his pillow, he silently muttered a prayer to the god he didn't even believe in: