for archiving purposes, since i almost lost this fic when i closed down my xanga

He remembers vividly what it was like to see his brother dead: it was like seeing himself, but not in a normal photograph. The sort that captured the person blank, and perfectly still, as though flattened, imprinted and traced onto a piece of paper without any dimension or vitality, the sort that belonged in another world. His brother was unmoving, his eyes were closed, and yet strangely the wounds still trickling blood slowly and sluggishly as though he were alive, a cruel imitation of life. He knew no words accompanied with a wave of a wand could bring his brother back; no words for his grief either, no words to say what it was like to look at yourself, dead.

For as long as he could remember his brother was always around and an inextricable part of his life, his presence never an intrusion, as natural as breathing or moving one's limbs. His brother: doing the same things he did, wearing the same clothes, completing his sentences, finishing his thoughts, sharing the same air, the same food, the same sense of humour, the same everything. They were two, a pair, and yet strangely and paradoxically, one together; their names never said by others singularly, but joined together -- a-n-d -- a conjunction, a link, a bond. He had never knew life without his brother, but it was all that awaited him now, an emotion unfamiliar, foreign and strange that he would live with for the rest of his life and never get used to.

Life would go on, and it did, but it was never life-as-it-was. There was an all-consuming black hole in the pit of his stomach, one that sucked away every happy thing such that life became a succession of nothingness, flat, blank and humourless. The laughter had died. Everything had taken on a new solemnity, the infinite weight of sadness made it impossible to see anything without thinking what-would-he-have-thought-about-this, or what-would-he-have-done. How was he to look at himself, his own hands and his own reflection in the mirror when all it did was remind him of his brother? Nevertheless, he still smiled and did all that he used to do, he got married, had children, lived and laughed and loved for he knew that was what he would have wanted his brother to do if he was the one that was gone, but it was immeasurably difficult. The sight of himself both repulsed and attracted him: a reminder of his brother, a reminder that he was the one that lived.

The day he first noticed his hair was turning grey he wondered if his brother's would have turned grey at the same time, and what joke he would have made about it.





It is hard to live for two people, when you are merely one.