Chapter Text
There is a nugget of truth in every lie.
Louie’s mantra. He couldn’t tell you where he heard it—maybe a teacher, or a character in one of those weird VHS shows he watched growing up since they couldn’t afford cable. Maybe he made it up.
Either way, he lives by it, swallows it in a pill and commits it to memory.
Lies ebb from his sharp mouth, natural as breath, of course he has rules for himself to follow. Lying, conning as he does, is not simple. It is a plan, a guide, twisting and turning in a way only he can understand. He loves this feeling, his brothers reading his steps and process and staring blankly. This is for him. Him only.
Was, he should say. Was for him only.
Not that there’s someone else who can read his plans quite like him, no. Scrooge says she’s sharp like him, but that’s clearly not the case. He’s been forbidden from the quiet, secretive sway of scheming. His tongue was to grow dull and lose its silver shimmer, because of his mother.
Lying in bed, it feels heavy in his mouth, metal weighting him down to the mattress.
He hated this.
That was the goal of grounding, he knew, but it was effective. He hated this.
Stomach rumbling and head pounding, crows eating away at his liver, he turned to lay on his back. He stared up at the underside of his brother’s mattress, aged and pilled.
On the wooden beams that held it up, the walls of Troy, dark brown and stained to lessen splinters in small, feathered hands, were the greenish translucence of glowy stars. Stuck up to ward away a duckling’s fears. They were irrational and the stars were a placebo. He didn’t care.
The burn on his knee, curtesy of the DT-87, throbbed in tune with his heartbeat. A sickening melody.
When they first moved into the mansion, was when they were stuck up.
Louie was a fearful child, frail-minded and cowardly as the lion. The dark was one of many fears, most of which he’d grown skillful at suppressing. In a new environment, separated from his brothers by height, he couldn’t.
Huey scavenged around the houseboat, little hands in big boxes. He settled on the sticky stars as a remedy.
He missed Huey. And Dewey. And Webby. It’d only been a day and yet.
He always hated being alone.
He never was, for most of his youth. A small home, little ducks ran wild between the few rooms. His brothers by his side, what could he not do? It was cliche, but it was the truth.
At school, they had their own lunch table, birds of a feather. At stores, uncle Donald had them hold hands. He was never alone.
He held a fair bit of distain for this, at the time. Other kids felt high and golden, having their own rooms and new, sparkling toys. Why could he not reach the ripest apples, create the sweetest cider?
Even as he thought this, he knew why. The other kids had ladders to reach high branches. He was on the dirt, apples rotten and worm-ridden. The water receded when he needed a sip.
But he still wanted. He still wants.
Classic greedy Louie. Maybe his mom was right.
He silences his phone to ignore the words she sat and recorded, so genuine and thought out and real. He wants to stand stuck to his principles, what he knows is true.
He manipulates the mind all the time. What it thinks it knows is not always real. Is he a burden? Is he a monster? Does he act without regard for his family?
It was clear what she thought.
He was a burning torch and an explosion of snakes. He did not bring anything good.
It made him feel unpersoned. It scratched at his skin, pigeonholed as evil and conniving when he meant well. They ripped out his heart and were playing puppeteer with his arteries.
As much as he wants to hold a strong hatred for his mother, he can’t. And as much as he wants to love her unconditionally, as his brothers do, he can’t. It’s a strange bit of dichotomy, one that makes him want to rip out feathers. It boiled beneath his skin.
His feelings tangled around and tied in a knot, bow lopsided and ugly.
His mind was too sharp. It could cut.