lirazel | fic: and sympathy

Title: and sympathy
Fandom: Shameless US
Written for:

rarewomen
Characters: Fiona Gallagher, Debbie Gallagher
Rating: PG-13
Thanks to:

madcap_shiny for looking it over
Also at: Archive of Our Own
Summary: Fiona doesn’t understand a damn thing about her little sister.

Fiona gets home from work one day (it’s a Thursday, which this week means she’s covering Casey Braxton’s shift running concessions at the dollar theater) and finds Debbie trying to make tea, and snaps (she even has a tea cozy. Fiona had no idea what the hell a tea cozy even was, but somehow Debbie’s managed to find one). It’s not that she minds that Debbie has different interests from the rest of the kids her age. It’s that Debbie’s interest are so very different that sometimes Fiona’s convinced that Debbie is actually a sixty-five-year-old British lady stuck in an eleven-year-old Chicago kid’s body, and Fiona wants Debbie to have friends. Her own age. Debbie might not notice how different she is right now, but the other kids sure as hell do, and Fiona is terrified of what’s going to happen when Debbie realizes what the other kids think of her. For the moment, she’s still oblivious, but she’s in middle school now, and middle school is hell (Fiona remembers. She had the world’s most intense awkward stage, all frizzy hair and legs longer than she knew what to do with and the acne, and she remembers how mean middle school girls can be. She’d take facing off against gang members any day). Fiona knows her family’s luck (Frank seems to hoard it all and use it to keep himself alive, when if there was any justice in the world he’d be long dead in a ditch right now), and she doesn’t believe for a second that there’s any way that Debbie’s strangeness won’t eventually get so hard to ignore that the kids start bullying her about it (the odds are for it: Lip’s always been smart enough to avoid the trouble he doesn’t want—as opposed to the kind he does—everyone’s always loved Ian, and Carl, well, Carl is scary as shit and even if everyone at school hates him—as Fiona suspects they do—they won’t mess with him. Which leaves Debbie as the Gallagher kid most likely to get bullied. These are the things Fiona thinks about pouring plastic-flavored imitation cheese on top of stale nacho chips for sweaty guys seeing the latest superhero movie for the fifteenth time).

The look on Debbie’s face when Fiona orders her out of the kitchen is sad-puppy hurt (Ian’s especially good at that look, so Fiona’s usually pretty immune to it), and it makes Fiona’s heart ache to see how young she looks. But she orders her sister upstairs to wait on her, and then turns around in time to save Liam’s little baby hands from scalding themselves in the hot water. Toddler on her hip, she cleans up the scattered tea leaves (English Breakfast Tea, it says on the box, though it’s 8:34 at night) and dumps out the hot water, and then she leaves Liam on the couch with Ian and Carl (they quickly switch the channel to one of those crime shows when she comes into the room, but she knows they’ll switch back to Showtime as soon as she’s out of hearing—Lip’s of course figured out how to get cable access without paying for it. She could call them on it, but she’s too tired for that battle tonight, and she doesn’t figure it’ll hurt them to see the sex scenes. She knows all about Ian’s porn stash, and nothing could possibly emotionally scar Carl. And Liam’s too young to understand any of it, so she lets them be). She picks up a couple of Lip’s t-shirts and one of Carl’s old rollerblades as she drags herself up the stairs, stops in the bathroom long enough to change the toilet paper roll (none of the rest of them ever remember to do it), and almost trips over a tennis racket (sometimes she thinks the house is going to kill her. She’ll stumble over a half-deflated soccer ball on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night and she’ll break her neck. The Gallaghers all sleep like the dead. No one would even notice until the next morning).

When she finally makes it to her own room (closet. Whatever), Debbie is sitting on the bed, her hands folded in her laps and sniffling in that way she has. Fiona looks at the top of her head, a halo of frizz that she remembers so well from the mirror when she was Debbie’s age (even if hers was a much darker shade of auburn at the time, back before it turned brown for good), kinky waves escaping from her ponytail, and she wonders how she’s managed to do this for so long and how much longer she can keep doing it (even when Mom was still around, it wasn’t like she did much. If Debbie is an old lady stuck in a kid’s body, for as long as Fiona can remember Mom has always been a fourteen-year-old girl with the IQ of a rock. Fiona’s theory is that the drugs killed Mom’s brain cells or the alcohol killed Frank’s, but one of them had to be at least mentally competent at some point, because there’s no other way those two could have produced Lip and his genius brain. Actually, now that she thinks about it, Carl might be a genius, too, only if he is, he’s the kind that ends up bringing down the government and blowing up buildings in bad action movies).

Speaking of old ladies, Fiona sounds and feels like one as she sighs and sits down on the bed beside her sister (her knees creak, and she’s been on her feet since six this morning, and it feels so good to sit down, and she feels a thousand years old and way too young to deal with this, all at once).

“Okay, Debs,” she says. “Why tea?”

Debbie launches off into a ramble about how she’d heard on TV (a daytime talk show, the kind that stay-at-home moms and retirees watch until The Price Is Right comes on) that tea helps with bone strength and fights cancer and lowers the risk of high cholesterol and heart disease and…. Fiona tunes her out after a minute (the thing is, as much as she wants to, she can’t actually listen to every word that comes out of her siblings’ mouths. If she did, she’s pretty sure her brain would explode. So she’s learned to figure out what’s important and she listens to that and filters out the rest. She’s pretty sure it’s the only thing that’s let her keep her sanity this long).

When Debbie finishes with her lecture, her sniffles are long forgotten and her eyes are hopeful, like she’s discovered this wonderful thing and she’s just waiting to see if Fiona gets how amazing it is.

Fiona doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get it at all. If this were about losing weight or getting better skin, she’d be able to understand Debbie’s enthusiasm. She was about that age when she first started being really aware of her appearance, right? (Before then, she’d been a tomboy, her knees always skinned and her legs always bruised from running around the neighborhood, climbing fences and jumping off the porch roof into the kiddie pool. She still loves to run, still sometimes has these moments when she’s running and she totally forgets to worry about what she looks like—or how she’s going to pay the electric bill or for Carl’s field trip—and focuses only on what her body can do and how cool that is. But she doesn’t have much time for those moments, not anymore, and when she thinks about her body at all it’s only to think of how tired she is or whether she looks hot enough tonight to get extra tips at the club.) But Debbie actually seems to care about bone density and things like that, and Fiona’s pretty sure she didn’t even know what that was when she was Debs’ age.

For the nine thousandth time since Debbie started talking, Fiona has to shake her head at how different her sister is. Debbie didn’t play with Barbies—didn’t dress them up and mash their plastic faces together like Fiona did, didn’t even cut their hair off like Lip or melt their feet off like Carl (goddamn sociopath. She’s really gotta do something about that kid). She played with baby dolls instead, but even in that she wasn’t like other little girls. She would measure them on an old meat scale (Frank had brought it home from the butcher’s once, and Fiona doesn’t know for sure, but she suspects he used it to price drugs) and scribble onto a clipboard and mutter about things like percentiles and growth charts. They had to bury more than one doll in the backyard, too: “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” Debbie said with a solemn face, and Fiona’s never seen anyone pray with more sincerity than when Debbie lit candles for the dolls at church.

And now Debbie’s starting to grow up, and she’s not worrying about what the other girls at school think of her, about what she looks like or whether her clothes are in fashion (the Gallaghers’ clothes are never in fashion. Even Fiona has lived most of her life in hand-me-downs from the neighbors and thrift store finds). She’s not even going through that rollercoaster time when she first starts noticing boys and trying to figure out how she relates to them. All of those things Fiona could handle. She knows what to say about them, what advice to give, because she’s been there (Fiona’s learned everything she knows the hard way, and she’s earned everything she has, little as that is). Instead, Debbie worries about the kids on the Compassion International commercials and where Liam is getting enough Vitamin A in his diet. Fiona’s even found her reading the encyclopedia a couple of times (they only have the H and R sections of the World Book, 1964, but that doesn’t seem to bother Debbie).

Fiona doesn’t understand a damn thing about her little sister. And right now, that’s all she can think about, their differences, about how Debbie still has middle school and all of high school in front of her, and if she keeps this up, Fiona doesn’t know how she’s going to steer her though them because all her hard-won wisdom won’t apply to the problems that Debbie’s going to have. Those years stretch out in front of her, long and scary, and Fiona’s twenty-one already (when the hell did that happen?) and Liam still has, like, sixteen more years until he graduates (all of the Gallagher kids will graduate. Fiona will make sure of that). (She doesn’t let herself think that by the time he does, she’ll be almost forty. She doesn’t let herself think about that ever).

She wants to talk about this, wants to try to get Debbie to realize that her life will be a lot easier if she at least pretends to care about the things other girls her age care about. She wants to tell her that maybe if she doesn’t talk about antioxidants and dietary supplements, that maybe she’ll have more friends her age and middle school won’t be quite as bad (it’ll always be bad. There’s nothing you can do about that. But it doesn’t have to be as bad as it’ll probably be for Debbie).

But she doesn’t say any of that. Instead, she says, “You know what I’ve heard, Debs? I’ve heard that tea can help you sleep better.” (She thinks she really has heard that. Not that she wouldn’t still say it even if she hadn’t, but it makes her feel better to know that she really thinks she has heard that.) And then she stands up and holds out her hand. They haven’t held hands since the days when Debbie was young enough to need to hold hands with an older sibling when they crossed the street. But Debbie grins, big and messy and young, and takes her hand, and the two of them go downstairs to the kitchen and make tea. It tastes awful, and Debbie’s face screws up, but she drinks every drop—after she’s emptied seven bags of Sweet’n’Low, swiped from the diner because who can afford to pay for sugar?— into her chipped Care Bears mug. Fiona grimaces and drinks down all of hers, too, and she does sleep really well that night. Though maybe that’s from exhaustion: Liam has a temper tantrum before bed that takes her twenty minutes to settle him down, and Lip comes in with a black eye and they have a screaming battle when he refuses to tell her where it came from, and then there’s trying to get Carl to do his homework, and well, when she collapses into bed—and purposefully doesn’t look at the time as she sets her alarm, because she doesn’t want to know how few hours of sleep she’s getting tonight—she thinks that maybe she handled the thing with Debbie right. Maybe Debbie will be okay. Maybe they all will be. Maybe.