good morning, brother

“Your boyfriend will be dead by tomorrow morning.”

Clarence woke up quietly, but in a cold sweat, limbs tangled in his sheets. He stared emptily at the ceiling and breathed deeply. Ice crept up his fingertips, quiet but dangerous, and his twin’s face swam in front of his vision. Then blood. His own blood, so much of it. He’d bled out, died of the blood loss more than the gunshot. He scrubbed his face with his hands, eyes blurring and watering, but it made it so he wasn’t seeing things anymore. His head hurt.

His bullet scar ached. Like it was still happening.

He hated this. He hated being like this.

Clarence stumbled out of his bed, so comfortable and yet so unwelcome for him when he was like this (sometimes going to sleep was worse than being awake, you never knew what you’d see). His stomach growled, and he didn’t feel like a real person.

He just stood in the bathroom for a long time, staring at himself in the mirror after splashing his face with water. Looking at his eyes, wondering if someone, anyone, would be able to tell yet. He started crying, sobbing, and sat on the tiles. Coldness kept infecting him.

Everything reminded him of Val and he hated it.

Coming back to life was horrible for Clarence, something like drowning. Both dying and living were the worst things Clarence had ever experienced.

Being dead had been... nothing. Clarence didn’t remember death as a status. He remembered those final desperate, heaving breaths, barely audible sounds in the back of his throat, how he was screaming for someone to help in his mind, but it was all growing weaker. He remembered fading vividly, the panic, the fear, and then the loss. Clarence didn’t go out with a bang, he went slowly. Pathetically. And he felt every second of it. The last thought wasn’t optimistic, it was just a hard fact, a reminder.

A certain knowledge that he wasn’t going to exist anymore, and that was that. Whoops. Nice try, but it’s time to do everyone a favor and give it up.

Clarence had never believed in an afterlife, never been tied to any religion. When individuals with powers lived all around you, and gods walked in your midst, it was hard for him to put the thought of such things on a pedestal. They were just as much here as the rest of them were, people, not rulers.

He didn’t trust cold, inhuman things to make judgements about his life anyway. Never had. It wasn’t unbiased logic, it was an excuse for shameless cruelty and superiority. So he couldn’t respect the idea of gods as people worshipped them, no.

It was possible he was wrong, that he just didn’t remember it, but Clarence felt much more uncomfortably assured that there was nothing waiting for him on the other side. That there hadn’t been anything when he’d died.

And then Val pulled him back up, out of the dirt like a dead flower.

What a privilege.

I’m not sick, Clarence thought to himself as he swallowed down his anxiety meds, among other similar pill concoctions. Haha. Not sick. Can’t be sick. I can’t be useful, can’t be who I’m supposed to be, if I’m sick.

While he was walking down the hall, painfully early in the morning and trying to be quiet, Val fell into step beside him. Clarence’s mouth went dry, and he stopped breathing for a second. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and narrowed his eyes at the ground.

“Good morning, brother,” Val said. It was an innocent thing to say, and yet triggered memories within him every time. A part of him, no, all of him, was sure Val knew that.

Coughing and choking on his own blood, full in his throat, as well as a horrible smell thick in the air. As his limbs thrashed, he registered being on the desk of his father’s study, elegant designs on the ceiling above him blurring and focusing, too intense for his eyes.

His head knocked to the side, and he could see a scene of blood on the floor, the spot he’d died. His heart stuttered, stopping before going into a panic, and repeat. He was bleeding on the desk now, too. Everywhere. There were symbols on the surface of it, along with the red, and on his skin, designs he recognized from Val’s books and notebooks when the other wasn’t hiding them away from outside eyes.

Cold hands were on his body now, and every part of him shivered with equal parts terror and hypersensitivity. His body was screaming. His head was screaming. He couldn’t actually scream, because his voice was caught in the blood in his throat, drowning. His back arched off the table to match his thrashing limbs. Everything hurt, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop-

“Good morning, brother.”

Triggers were shitty.

It shouldn’t have been him. Despite the horrible cocktail of both self hatred and superiority Clarence had mixed into his being, he knew that much. Teenagers were such fucking idiots. Young love? Pathetic. He’d become a monster, a shadow of himself, for the sake of some boyfriend that had run from him first chance given and never looked back.

His father was probably dead now anyway, so what was there to run from? ...That was an ironic thought, and as much advice to himself as it was to some runaway boyfriend.

Why did he throw away his life for something he couldn’t even keep.

Val knew. He had to have known. He knows everything. Sometimes, Clarence wondered if his twin was some big delusion of his, an excuse he used to rationalize things in his brain. Maybe he’d just been born without magic because he was worthless, and not because some other child took it all. Maybe his father had just scorned and ignored him for the early part of his life because he was worthless, not because there was another child there to pay more attention to. Maybe there was no Val to trick him into getting killed by his own father. Fuck, maybe Clarence had never even had a boyfriend, and his father had just murdered him because he was sick of him, and maybe this right now was purgatory-

Valentine was staring at him, and Clarence realized he’d stopped moving entirely.

“Is there something wrong, Clarence?”

Clarence swallowed slowly. “No. Everything is fine.”

Should he have died after all? Would thinking that, suffering full on and proper, sitting in his self hatred, make it all just leave him alone?

No. No, it shouldn’t have been him.

Val smiled.