A/N: I know it's been awhile since I've updated. I just got distracted by other things. I know it's not much of an excuse, but it's the truth.

I don't have 'normal' relationships. I had known that much ever since I was a kid and saw that the other kids families were much different than mine was. As soon as I realized that I was different in that way, I began to observe everybody else. Part of the reason was because I wanted to fit in and be a 'normal' kid. The main reason why I did this though was because I was a little jealous. My home life was a mess, and I just wanted to know what it could be like.

The funny thing was, I wasn't the only one. There were tons of kids who were like me at school...well, not exactly, but they didn't really come from 'normal' families either. There were the kids whose parents were gay and they wondered what it was like to have a mom. There were the kids whose parents had been divorced all their lives who had no idea what it was like to be raised by two people rather than one. Plenty of kids had been raised by their grandparents or other relatives, and they didn't understand the relationships that everybody else had with their grandparents, aunts, or uncles.

Once we hit the later years of junior high most kids my age had figured out that there wasn't really much of a point in questioning each other on what defined a normal family. The thing was, there wasn't one single set way of how a family should be, and no other way worked at all. The funny thing was that at that time we all figured out that actually very few kids were raised in 'normal' households. 'Normal', was actually considered the most strange.

All the kids at my age had basically stopped trying to figure out what was normal, but there was one aspect of a 'normal' family that just fascinated so many of us.

Siblings.

A lot of kids at my school were either a single child or their siblings were so much older or younger than them that it almost didn't count. We were all fascinated by how siblings interacted with each other at school. Sometimes they completely ignored each other. Sometimes the older one took on the role of a kind of protector. Sometimes they were so close that it was often mistaken that they were dating.

A bunch of the guys at my school who were only children had taken to calling each other 'bro'. None of them had any siblings, and the closest thing that any of them would ever get to a brother was each other. They just kinda unofficially adopted each other as siblings.

A lot of the kids actually ended up doing this, and I was one of them...not with the kids at school though. No. At that time the others all just saw me as a loser who never took anything seriously. None of those kids would ever see me as a 'bro', and the feeling was pretty much mutual.

I had friends outside of school though, and without even realizing it I began to think of two of them as my surrogate brothers. Roy Harper and Dick Grayson. They were my best friends. My fellow protégés. My partners in crime.

My brothers.

Unlike most of my other weird relationships, I don't bother to keep these ones to myself. We've never actually talked about it, but my friends know that I think of them as brothers, and I know that they feel the same way. The fact that we can tell without even having to say it just proves how strong our relationship actually is.

And the funny thing was, I didn't get along with either of them when we had first met.

Right off the bat none of us liked each other. Each of us was under the impression that the others thought that they were better than us, and in a way we were all kinda right.

Dick was the first fellow child hero that I had met, and man, was he a pain in the butt. Before I had met him I had thought that Robin was really amazing. He had been the first kid to really make a name for himself as a hero. After meeting him though, my admiration quickly died, because as impressive as he was, he was also an unbearably cocky little brat.

Dick knew that he was the first kid hero, and in the beginning he used to act like that made him better than any of the others that came after him. Looking back I know that Dick was just messing around with us, but back then he just seemed incredibly arrogant. And what made things worse was that both me and Roy secretly thought that Dick had a point when he claimed he was better than us, because of the three of us he was the one best at keeping his emotions in check during a fight. And he had actually had prior experience/training before he had even started, which immediately put him leagues above me and Roy who, unfortunately, had a very awkward first few months as Kid Flash and Speedy.

Then there was Roy Harper. He was just a few years older than me, but those couple of years made all the difference. When I had first met him Roy had been at that awkward teenage phase of desperately wanting to fit in, and for a young hero that meant having an in with the older generation of heroes, and that was kinda hard to do when you're always pushed together with the 'kids'.

Roy had not liked that very much at all. He was angry and bitter that he apparently wasn't being taken seriously, and it really wasn't a lot of fun to be around somebody who was just so mad all the time. Eventually though me and Dick both began to see the softy that Roy really was, and it was pretty easy to get along with him after that.

And as for me, well, when I had first started being Kid Flash I had only recently gotten my powers. I was still extremely excited and proud of my new abilities, and I may had been a bit of a show off with them for the first few months. To Roy and Dick, neither of whom had powers, it probably felt like just a bit of a slap in the face.

Thankfully though we all matured a little, or at least enough to not act like massively petty and jealous brats. Sure, it took a couple of kidnappings and missions that were unsupervised by our mentors to get there, but it happened eventually.

After we started getting along, suddenly we all just became best friends. Without even realizing it I began to think of Dick is my younger, annoying, and absolutely amazing genius brother who was still a massive pain in the butt sometimes. And Roy was definitely the angry older brother who actually cared a lot more than he wanted me to think he did.

I'm actually incredibly lucky to have both Dick and Roy as friends. I know that they'll always have my back, whether we're we're heroes or civilians. Even if it's three in the morning I can still count on them. And that's not just me saying things. Both of them have actually helped me out in the middle of the night, in rather embarrassing situations.

I've always been proud to say that I'm pretty good at school. Science is my best subject, though I'm pretty good at most everything else too...except English. I don't even know why, but I've always had a hard time with English class. There are just so many rules, which wouldn't be so bad if there weren't five conditions to go with every rule. It's impossible to remember it all.

So, I'm not so proud to say, I procrastinated doing my English assignments. Multiple times I would put them off so much that it would be the day before an essay is due and I haven't even started it. At these times the only person I can turn to is Dick, who is a bit of a word wizard (don't tell him I said that though. His made up words like 'traught' are still ridiculous).

No matter how many hours it would take, or how late we would have to stay up, Dick was always willing to help me just get an essay written that would get at least a decent grade. He's a good kid.

I've never had to go to Roy for homework help before. He helps me in a completely different way than Dick does.

Look, I know that I act all cocky and confident while I'm Kid Flash, but I've been a hero for awhile now, and I've seen some things that I wish I could forget. Hair raising, terrifying things that just stay with me and won't go away. During the day I'm able to push these things to the back of my mind. At night though, when I'm asleep, there's nothing I can do to keep these terrors from following me into my dreams and becoming nightmares.

I've always felt incredibly silly about this. I mean, I'm a superhero. I fight super villains every single day and help save the world a couple times a year. I shouldn't still be getting bothered by these things, but I do. And it's not even the supervillain stuff that bothers me, it's the other stuff. The things that normal, supposably non-evil people have done.

It scares me just how bad people can be sometimes.

So, yeah, I've had a couple of nightmares that have kept me up the rest of the night. Roy found out by accident after I had one of them when he was crashing the night at my place. My waking up woke him up. He hadn't gotten annoyed or upset like I thought he would have. He didn't even try to be all sympathetic about it. Roy just stayed up and talked to me about whatever was going through his head until I fell asleep.

After Roy found out that these nightmares were a reoccurring thing, he made me swear that whenever I have one I was to call him up, no matter how late or early it was. I've reluctantly done just that, because it feels much better to talk to somebody than to just sit quietly by myself after a nightmare. I haven't told him what the nightmares are about, and he hasn't pushed for information. Roy doesn't feel the need to know why I'm upset. He's just willing to be there to help me calm down.

Both Roy and Dick are always there whenever I need them, and that's what makes them the best friends I've ever had, and probably will ever have.

That's what makes them my brothers.

A/N: Well, that was fun. I don't know whether I made any of you uncomfortable with that line about how some siblings are so close that it's sometimes mistaken that they're dating. The funny thing is, that comes from real life. Me and two of my sisters have all been mistaken for my younger brother's girlfriend. Similarly two of my cousins, who aren't siblings, but they are cousins too, go to different schools but had the same school trip. While there the two of them just hung out with each other, and all of their friends wondered if the two of them were actually dating...yeah, my family's so close that holding hands and leaning against each other is just something that we do. It is kinda funny to be mistaken for boyfriend and girlfriend because of it though.

Off the topic of my weird family, I hope you enjoyed the chapter. It was a little harder to write than I'd expected, because I'm used to writing bromance stuff, and as my personal opinion is that bromance is the line separating friendship and romance, it was a little weird. I had to figure out how to write this bromance without, you know, going into the 'mance' stuff. Anyways, the next and last chapter is 'cousins', and since we all know who 'Uncle' is, I don't think it should be all that shocking who it's going to be about.