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Stuart Twombly was an only child. He wasn't always, though. He had an older brother. He stopped having an older brother when he was seven years old.There was a car accident on a lonely bridge in Colorado. It was just himself, his mother, and his brother in the car. Their dad was at home packing his things. The divorce was final. Joshua Twombly was nine. He adored his little brother and they talked and joked in the back seat as their mother tried her best to navigate through the falling snow in the cold night.Josh had just finished telling Stu a story about the time he went surfing in California with their uncle Adrian while Stuart was sick at home in Colorado, with their mom and dad, just a little thing. Josh made a promise, told Stu he was going to take him surfing when they got old enough, said he was going to teach him just like their uncle taught Josh. Then the pain hit.Stu jerked in his seat as he realized his mother had shouted something back to her boys. His head hit the window and he was out, seconds after he heard Josh scream and the crunching of metal and cracking of bone.When he woke up, he was lying on his back on the snow covered bridge, excruciating pain shooting throughout his whole body as he heard the familiar screaming of his mother. He tried to sit up but found it too painful. So he lay there as he tried to make out his mom's words, blinking against the falling snowflakes landing on his blood stained face. He could feel something wet on the side of his face, not realizing it was the tears falling from his eyes, and he breathed deep, whimpering as he felt the hurt in his chest, the cries from his mom strange, something he had never heard before. There was something off about it and he vaguely wondered where Josh was.His eyes started to grow heavy under the falling snow and streetlights glowing over head. He tried to turn his head again and felt the pain, giving up as his eyes fluttered and closed, the last thing he heard being his own sad sigh and the heels of his mom's shoes approaching.When he woke again, he was lying in a warm bed, a strange beeping sound and the soft voices of women surrounding him. He opened his eyes through a heavy fog and sighed again, taking in the sight of the nurses in their scrubs and gray light of day through the window, the snow still falling. He turned back to the nurses as one of them placed a gentle hand on his face, smiling sadly at him. He remembered what Josh had told him about the nurses in hospitals since Josh had been there because he twisted his ankle playing soccer with their uncle Adrian.He remembered Josh telling him that nurses were always nice and soft and smelled pretty and were like the happy side of their mom and they always wanted to talk. Josh told him that they wore weird clothes but that they were always willing to give hugs and always made people feel better. But the news these nurses brought did anything but make Stuart feel better.When they told him about Josh, he didn't understand. At first, he thought it was a sick joke, the kind his next door neighbor Raleigh would play with Josh, but their smiles weren't the ones Raleigh had. These were the smiles his dad wore when he told Josh and Stuart their uncle Adrian had died, succumbed to a cancer the boys didn't even know he had lived with in the first place. That was when Stuart knew. He just knew. He didn't anyone to tell him what his mother was screaming about on the bridge when he was fighting for consciousness. He already knew. Josh had never even made it to the hospital alive in the first place. He never even made it out of the freezing water, where the car had gone over the bridge, until after Stuart and his mother had been taken from the scene. He already knew.It was his father who tried to tell him that Josh wasn't coming home with them, his mother who tried to keep him out of the morgue when he pushed the nurses out of the way and gave the mortician a pleading look, tears in his eyes that he wouldn't let fall. Josh had told him he had to be strong, when they went to their uncle's funeral. He told Stuart he wasn't supposed to cry because boys didn't cry and that he had to make uncle Adrian proud of how strong he was. He was going to be strong for Josh.So he looked upon Josh's body and furiously wiped the tears away, taking a deep breath and resolving to be strong. It wasn't until he had run into his and Josh's room that he slammed the door and fell to the floor, finally letting the tears fall. It was here he curled up in Josh's bed and hugged one of Josh's old stuffed animals to his chest tightly as he cried throughout the night. Here, Josh couldn't see him. Here he could cry and not let them see how weak he really was.The weeks, months, years, that followed that day were hard for Stuart to get through. If there had ever been any chance for his parents to work their marriage out before, there was none after Josh died. Stuart lived between his parents and stayed with his dad during the school year, attending an elite private academy in upstate Maine where he met a few kids he would've called his friends if Josh were alive. But he wasn't. So Stuart stayed mostly to himself, only coming out of his shell when he was needed to.The only person he let in after Josh's death was a teacher at the academy his dad sent him to. The teacher in question was a photography teacher in his forties by the name of George Houren with perpetually skewed glasses and a sagely face, shaggy dark hair and stubble to match. He was just a little pudgy and he wore cardigans and khakis with boat shoes. He had a deep but gentle voice and he always wore a soft look on his face, sharing sympathetic and warm smiles with Stuart. He was the only one Stuart trusted enough to let himself cry around.He was fourteen and he would sit in Mr. Houren's class after all the other students had left and cry, listening as the man's gentle, baritone voice comforted him and reassured all his doubts, encouraging him to live to fight another day. He was the sole reason Stuart didn't end up killing himself that year. His parents tried, they really did. It was just so hard when he had to go home every single day of his life and look in the mirror only to see Josh looking back at him, smiling and perfect and flawless and young as the day he died. He wasn't seeing a ghost, he wasn't hallucinating, it was all just the product of his grief, a thing he couldn't deal with yet, even after seven years of grieving. It was just so difficult to roll over and get out of bed some mornings when all he wanted to do was curl in on himself and spend the day crying.He was seventeen when he finally decided to go forward. It wasn't necessarily the same thing as letting Josh go but it was a step in the right direction. He came home from a particularly rough day at school and sighed heavily as he threw himself down on the leather couch in his dad's living room. He dropped his bag near the couch and looked down at his phone, buzzing with a message from his mom, telling him she loved him and that she found something he might like to do.She told him about an internship program with Google, said it would be fun and he might learn some valuable lessons, but he would have to be enrolled in college before he could do it. She said that since he was only a few months from graduating, he could try it out and see if he liked it. He didn't really want to think about it, though. With each new step he took in his life, each milestone he reached, he realized that was one Josh would never reach. That was an experience Josh would never have. It was nobody's fault. The weather had been bad that night. The tires had slipped on the ice and his mother had lost control of the car. It was no one's fault and, yet, every time he tried something new or did something new he couldn't look to his side and share it with Josh because Josh wasn't there to share it with him.He told her he'd think about it and the only thing that convinced him in the end was Mr. Houren. The man pulled Stuart aside after class one day. Stuart was expecting praises, questions, concerns, anything but this. It was yet another knife in his heart when, with a grave voice, the older man told Stuart that he had cancer and he was sorry for having to drop this on Stuart but he wasn't going to be available any more after classes to talk to. He said Stuart could visit him and Stuart started crying all over again.It took a good ten minutes before he could get himself under control and, when he did, he told his teacher about the internship program his mother had mentioned. Mr. Houren's face lit up. He told Stuart that he should go. He should do something with his life, he should let Josh go and, for once, embrace the loss. He should let himself be free of the guilt and the hurt and do something for himself for once, instead of always trying to make his lost ones proud of him. He told Stuart that Josh would be proud of him anyways if he moved on and started to live instead of just exist.It took Stuart a week before he made his decision. He woke up in tears in the middle of the night and found himself in the kitchen downstairs, crying over a cup of milk with honey, Josh's favorite when he was alive.His dad found him a half an hour later, Stuart's mom with him. She'd been visiting recently to check up on Stuart. After a lengthy and pained talk, Stuart told his parents he would go. He said he would enroll somewhere and he'd go. He would look at the different choices he had for universities around the states and he'd try this internship thing out. Besides, Google would be a fun company to work for.After his tests and subsequent graduation, Stuart got into the University of California in San Francisco and applied to the internship, which he would start come summer time.When he actually left for Mountain View, California, it was with tears in his eyes. He had never let his mom and dad see him cry and this time he held nothing back. He told his parents he loved them and he left for a new chapter in his life, driving from Maine all by himself and getting there within a week, a record for him as he had spent most of his middle school and high school career road tripping with his mom and aunt Maya.After the initial registration and settling in, he took out his phone, the one he hadn't taken his eyes off since he left Maine, and continued the conversation his mom had started sometime the night before when he arrived in San Francisco.When they were separated into teams, he ended up with the most useless people, naturally. He was barely there, focusing only on the texts his mom and dad and Mr. Houren sent him. He kept track of Mr. Houren's condition daily, commiserating with him over all the treatments they were administering and rating the nurses and their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to that-nurse-from-the-Blink-182-album-cover.With the constant barrage of insults from Graham and the ignorance he had to deal with from his own team, Stuart kept his eyes down and focused on Mr. Houren and his own parents as he made his way through the internship with nothing to show for it. Between Billy and Nick just not knowing anything and Lyle trying to pull everyone together, he had to put aside his differences with Neha and Yo-yo, after Mr. Houren chastised him over text, and get his shit straight.He put some effort into the Quidditch game and they still lost. He joined in on the fun when the rest of them led the dinosaurs on a wild hunt after Professor Xavier. He sighed and sucked it up when they were forced to go out to eat, leading them to the strip club. That...is where things got interesting.Stuart lost himself after the unexpected finger sucking he received and he forgot about his family for the night, forgot about Mr. Houren and his parents, who were apparently trying to work out their relationship, after all. He tried not to hold out too much hope for them.He danced the night away with the women who were just too damn hot to be restricted to this tiny little club, wearing nothing but their strappy little outfits and ridiculous heels and full lips and gyrating hips and they just shouldn't be this hot!After the club, when they were kicked out for finishing a fight they didn't even start in the first place, they stood over the Golden Gate bridge and something came over Stuart. It was like he had a revelation. He could hear little Josh's voice in the back of his mind, just like when they were seven and nine all over again. He could Josh excitedly talking to him.“I'm gonna take you surfing, Stewie, and teach you just like Uncle Adrian taught me. We're gonna go see the Grand Canyon and the gators in Florida and watch a football game and we're gonna go see the Golden Gate Bridge, man. That's a good one. Uncle Adrian told me that when you see it it's awesome. He says it's huge and you just kind of go 'ah' and stuff. I don't know, man. That's how he told me. Someday, though, little brother, we're gonna go there together. We're gonna see the Golden Gate Bridge together. I promise, Stewie.” It was just standing here, over this massive structure that Josh had promised to take him to seven years earlier, that finally brought him the sweet relief he'd been searching for all those years since Josh's death. It was subtle but it was definitely there, nevertheless.He gazed out over the bridge and just smiled, thinking 'Josh would've loved this.'He took a deep breath and ignored the insistent buzzing of his phone in his pocket as Nick came over and started asking him questions, talking to him through the epiphany and Stuart felt the familiar sting of tears pricking at his eyes but he swallowed them back and let go. He told Nick that this had been the best night of his life, although if he left out the little tidbit of why it was only his business. Nick didn't need to know about Josh Twombly, aged 7. It wasn't important and perhaps if they won, he'd tell him years down the road, when he was ready.When they had gone back to the complex and made their app, entirely inspired by Yo-yo, and started preparing for the next challenge, Stuart finally checked his phone. Turned out, his life was taking a turn for the better. Mr. Houren was getting better. The chemo was helping and he was getting progressively stronger. Stuart did a little inner victory dance as the team went on their merry way with the next challenge: tech support.They did pretty well. That is, until they realized that Billy had never logged in at the end. Their team didn't finish that one and Graham started on his superiority speech yet again as Billy abandoned them and went on his merry little way, fighting his own inner demons. Nick went after him and Stuart retreated to his dorm, throwing himself on his bed in frustration. That's when Neha came in.“Hey, Tiger. You gonna go out with us? We're going to try around for the next challenge. We're not the best at sales or anything but we figure we may as well give it a shot, right?” she asked from the doorway. Stuart smiled, eyes fixed on the ceiling. The exact attitude Josh had always had as a kid and Neha carried it right to his doorstep...literally.“Yeah. Just...give me a minute, kay?” he shot back. Being met with silence, he sat up to see her smiling, tilting her head almost curiously.“What?” he asked, confused.“Nothing. You just...it's the first time I haven't seen you stuck in your phone. Well, except for the club but that was different.” she said. Stuart smiled and scoffed.“Come on, Neha. We could at least have some fun while we're at it, yeah? I mean, let's say that Nick and Billy don't come back. At least we got to have the experiences.” he said, grinning when Neha took his hand and they made off in search of Lyle and Yo-yo.Well, Nick and Billy did return and it was just in time to witness the rest of the team fail spectacularly. They stood outside the pizzeria just as the two older men pulled up and led them back inside with promises of greatness and success. Naturally, Billy talked the owner into it, with little help from the rest.They made their way back to the complex just as Chetty was preparing to announce Graham and his team the victors. This...this didn't happen, though. You see, Lyle's team had capitalized on a franchise and Chetty saw the long term profit from that. So, they won instead. And free pizza for everyone, too. Nick got the girl and Stuart, well, he got the girl, too. He promised to visit Neha as often as he could. He transferred himself to a college back home in Maine, where he could keep an eye on Mr. Houren. He started calling the man Georgie and then his parents got back together, at long last. He kept a pessimisstic outlook at first, just to be cautious, but his hope eventually won out and he helped them with their second wedding.The wedding was...different. He was here, watching his parents get married, and all without Josh by his side. He wasn't going to cry, he didn't cry anymore, not because he was numb but because he had finally been able to let go and let himself be free of the persistent, oppressive darkness hanging over him. He was still sad, though, at the wedding. He was sad because he realized that he was now the older brother. His brother had died at the age of nine. Here he was now, eighteen years old, and his older brother was buried in the form of a nine-year-old boy's body. He had been immortalized as a nine-year-old boy and he couldn't be here at the wedding and Stuart was...well, he was strangely okay with that. He felt fine now. He was healing and he was moving on and he was fine and now Josh would always be his little brother.After the wedding, which Neha had attended so she could have an excuse to come see Stuart, he went to visit Josh's grave. Neha found him there and learned the whole story. He cried. But this time he cried tears of happiness. His life was getting back on track and everything was alright now and Neha was here and he would have such a story to tell Josh when they saw each other again because believing that was the only thing he wouldn't give up on or let go.Years later, when Stuart and Neha lived in a home of their own in California and had their own children, three-year-old Mia and five-year-old Cale, Stuart left out pictures of the whole family all over the house. There was Cale and Mia's first steps. There was the first time little Mia grabbed mommy's face and planted the sloppiest excuse of a kiss on her nose, copying what she saw the much better coordinated Cale do earlier that day. There was the one with a pregnant Neha, she was pregnant with Mia, at a family reunion with Stuart's side of the family. He hadn't been in the picture because he was out chasing Cale around the back yard with the rest of the children and the in-laws.His favorite two pictures, though, were always the ones on the mantle above the fireplace. These were the ones he'd go back for in the event of a fire, the ones he'd risk his life to rescue.The first one was of himself with his mom, his dad, and Josh when they were six and eight years old. Whenever he looked at it he never thought of the imminent tragedy that would strike them in one year. No, he always saw his favorite superhero, his best friend, his big brother who had, in a way, become his little brother. The second picture was the one of himself, Neha's family, and Neha surrounding Cale and Mia at Stuart's thirtieth birthday party. They'd had the party on the beach, the exact same place where uncle Adrian taught Josh how to surf all those years ago. It was the single best day of his life, with one exception. The day he learned his big brother had never left him. The day he stood before the Golden Gate Bridge and remembered all the promises Josh had made to him, the promises he never got to keep. So, Stuart would pass those promises on instead to his own children. He'd pass them on to Josh's niece and nephew and maybe then Josh would look down and see what his little brother had done and be proud.Maybe he was watching over Stuart with uncle Adrian, too.Mia had once said that when they got too old to move they'd go to heaven and they'd have a Luau with Uncle Josh and Great Uncle Adrian, just like they did on the beaches in Hawaii. Stuart had smiled and hugged her tight to his chest.Maybe they would have a Luau. Then they'd all be together again. It'd be Josh and Stuart against the world again and maybe this time uncle Adrian could teach Stuart how to surf, too. Maybe they could finally make good on those promises they never got the chance to get around to. Yeah, that'd be nice. He'd like that.