Chapter Text
On December 1st, Luke starts acting weird.
Alex only notices it, he’s pretty sure, because he’s known Luke so long. The signs are subtle enough at first—Luke spacing out between songs at rehearsal, startling whenever someone says his name, jiggling his knee and bouncing on his toes and just generally being even less able to sit still than usual—that it’s not hard to ignore them if you’re someone like Julie, who can just brush them off as Luke being Like That, or even Reggie, who’s known Luke even longer than Alex has but likes to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Alex, however, is a self-proclaimed expert in the Ways of Luke Patterson and that expertise requires that he be well-versed in all the ways Luke tells people he’s not okay without ever actually saying he’s not okay. When Luke is upset, he wears sleeves (the brown plaid flannel he stole from his dad when he’s feeling particularly vulnerable, the purple dress shirt he only bought because it looked like the one Patrick Swayze wore in Ghost when he needs an extra boost of confidence, the mismatched trench coat he made himself in ninth grade Home Ec when he’s insecure and wants to look cool, etc, etc, etc). When Luke is angry, he throws things (usually the darts if they’re in the studio, but sometimes his journal or a pen if a song’s not working, and on one memorable occasion involving The Catcher in the Rye and an egregious misuse of the word “hero,” Alex’s drumsticks at their English teacher’s head). When Luke is sick, he pretends not to be, usually without much success.
But from what Alex can tell, Luke isn’t upset or angry or sick. He’s just… off. And Alex doesn’t know how to explain it, so he’s not sure what the best course of action might be for confronting Luke about it.
The boys spend their first New Years’ Eve as ghosts haunting the Molinas’ holiday party. The rules of their visibility and tangibility to lifers other than Julie are still a little unclear (and annoyingly inconsistent) but they’ve been having a lot of success with eating lately, so they steal snacks and sodas from Julie’s kitchen, and Reggie eats half the cake Tía Victoria brought that Alex is pretty sure wasn’t meant for the guests, and Alex spends most of the party trying to avoid being walked through and wishing he’d thought to invite Willie while munching on mini-empanadas.
Luke, on the other hand, doesn’t eat any of the ambiguously healthy party foods he’d usually be shoving in his mouth at the first opportunity. In fact, he mostly hovers around the vegetable tray and nurses a red Solo cup filled with orange juice, and then he turns in long before the clock strikes midnight, leaving Julie looking more than a little disappointed, and when Alex and Reggie return to the studio, Luke’s already passed out on the couch.
(Whether or not ghosts need to sleep is still a bit up for debate, but they’ve recently discovered that ghosts can sleep and Luke instantly declared himself a big fan.)
As they move into January, Luke doesn’t stop lounging around in sleeveless muscle shirts, but he does insist on closing the studio doors whenever the temperature outside dips below 55 degrees (even though they don’t really feel the cold as ghosts, or if they do it doesn’t bother them), and he makes himself sleep at least six hours a night whether he needs it or not, and he asks Julie to buy him a pack of sugar-free gum so he can chew on that during rehearsal instead of on his guitar pick.
If Alex cared enough to be worried, he might have figured it out sooner, but none of Luke’s oddities interfere with their band, and none of his telltale signs of wrongness make themselves known, so Alex lets himself be distracted by his music and his boyfriend and doesn’t say anything about it until January 29th, when he walks in on Luke in the studio bathroom, frantically washing his hands and muttering, “I just gotta make it through February,” over and over and over to himself.
Alex pauses in the doorway, considering whether or not he wants to deal with this right now. He’d only come into the studio to restock the Band-Aids he used to keep in his fanny pack (they have yet to confirm or deny whether ghosts can bleed, but Willie wants to teach Alex how to skateboard so he’s not taking any chances) and he’s supposed to be meeting Willie down at the beach any minute now. He could back away, pretend he never saw anything, leave Luke to deal with whatever craziness he’s going through right now.
But Alex should probably be a good friend or whatever. And Luke’s so agitated his hands keep phasing through the bar of soap, which even Alex has to admit is kind of concerning. So he takes a deep breath, prays he won’t regret this, and says, “Luke, what are you doing?”
Luke jumps, dropping the soap again and splattering water onto the front of his shirt. He doesn’t seem bothered by it, though, just stares wide-eyed at Alex and rushes to turn the faucet off (it takes a few tries). “Hey, bro, what’s up?” he says, clearly trying for casual but missing the mark by about a mile.
Alex raises an eyebrow. “You want to tell me what’s been going on with you? Cause you’re acting weird, man. And not just ‘Julie wore a pretty sweater and smiled and you lost the ability to function’ weird. Weird weird. So what gives?”
Luke blushes, and stalls by drying his hands on the cloth towel hanging next to the sink. And Alex knows him, can see the moment Luke decides not to lie to him, and Alex tenses up, waiting for some horrible truth, some admission that’s going to send the lives (and afterlives) of Julie and the Phantoms into some horrible death-defying adventure when it feels like they just managed to escape the last one.
What he does not at all expect Luke to say is, “Okay, so you know how we’re not normal ghosts?”
Alex blinks. “No, Luke, I hadn’t noticed.”
“Shut up, you know what I mean. Willie says most ghosts can’t eat, right? Outside of Caleb’s club, I mean? But we can. And most ghosts can’t be seen or touched by lifers, but ever since Julie saved us from the jolts, we can. So what if we can do other things ghosts aren’t supposed to be able to do? Less pleasant things, I mean. I just want to make it through one winter, man. I don’t want to take any chances.”
Alex frowns, stammering, “Luke, what are you—?” But then, almost all of a sudden, the pieces come together in his mind. The orange juice and the temperature controls and the chewing gum and now, the handwashing. “You’re trying not to get sick.”
Luke slumps, a little embarrassed maybe but mostly relieved Alex figured it out so he wouldn’t have to say it. “I know it’s stupid,” he says with a shrug, “but I got sick at least once a year, every winter, when I was alive, you know that. And I hated it, not just feeling like crap but being stuck in bed, not able to sing or play or anything, and then after—”
He cuts himself off, ducking his head, but Alex can guess where he’d been going. After Luke ran away, being sick was more than just uncomfortable or annoying, it was downright scary. Alex remembers all too clearly the last time Luke got sick (fatal food poisoning notwithstanding), after he’d moved into the studio and a too-high fever almost sent him to the hospital because no adults knew he was living there and the three teenagers who did didn’t know shit about taking care of him.
“I don’t want to do that to Julie’s dad,” Luke says. “I’m not his kid, you know? He’s doing us a favor letting us crash here and I don’t want to bring him any extra trouble. So the more I can do to keep myself healthy until the seasons change, the better off I’ll be.”
“I guess that’s fair enough,” Alex allows, clapping a reassuring hand on Luke’s bare shoulder. “But you know something that might help with that? Sleeves.”
Luke makes a face. “Ugh, no, anything but that.”
A week later, Luke’s calmed down the compulsiveness a little bit. He still washes his hands a lot, and keeps his guitar pick out of his mouth, but he’s not so nervous and jittery all the time, a fact they all appreciate. The latest he ever got his seasonal cold was February 6 or so, back in ‘95, so the farther out from that date they get, the more Luke seems to relax, and the less Alex feels like he has to keep an eye on him, waiting for something to go wrong.
So of course when something does go wrong, it has nothing to do with Luke at all. Of course, on February 12, two days before Valentine’s Day, it’s not Luke that gets sick, but Julie.