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‘How did you do it?’ Saeran asks.
He has to know.
The hospital is quiet around them, as hospitals always are. Magenta is an open wound in the back of his head where all his confidence leaks out, but he is calm. He’s been here before. Not here-here, but in the in-between of it all (all hospitals are the same if you know how to squint the right way).
There was a hospital after that first visit, when two had come to take the place of one. V had given him a candy on the way there and the Saviour no rika no no saviourhershe had held his hand through the doctor’s questioning and smiled sweetly at him. She’d never stopped smiling during those days, broad and enrapturing and strewn with promises of gentle words – a useful skill that he’d never quite mastered. He wants to ask Saeyoung about the smiling too.
‘How did you keep going?’ he says instead. Saeran needs to know, even though by this point he’s afraid he might already know the answer.
There had been a hospital at Magenta too, the spitting image of this one. Except for the windows. There were no windows on the lower levels, just you and your thoughts and the endless ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway (Saeran is almost sure he can trust his memories on that). Hospitals are the same where it matters though; just like the cheap ice cream of his childhood, frozen water and sugar and a different colour every day, just like Saeyoung’s skin next to his skin, like those hazy, unfocused eyes looking up into Saeran’s own. Something like that, at least. Something alike.
The answer is slow to come, silence wrapping around Saeran’s already tightened throat like a shroud. A small death. He’s had a lot of those lately, big deaths too. All manner of emptiness he’s been forced to fill out. Saeran tries to think himself out of this one, but his mind is out of control, struggling to at least crystalise around a singular concern (it’s everything at once these days). He’s worried his brother will leave him again, he’s worried Saeyoung will think he’s stupid, he’s worried about being enough, he’s angry that he cares, he’s angry and tired and making an effort and Saeyoung is just sitting there, refusing to answer a simple question.
He has a flash of a thought, an old thought, flittering playfully at the forefront of his brain and Saeran indulges the fantasy for a bit. That neck is inviting. He could do it, easily even. There’d be no one around to see it for now and he has the element of surprise on his side. All he has to do is reach out and wrap –
He stops.
The sun sneaks in through the open window. It cuts a sharp line across Saeran's thighs and something unpleasant stirs in the back of his throat. He had longed for the sky, but there’s something violent and invasive in this, something with too many eyes where eyes should not be that leaves him feeling skinless and scratched raw where the light hits. The light knows about the double him, about the point where the broken edges of his skull draw blood from the people around, and it stings to be seen like that.
It must have seeped through the hole in the back of my head, Saeran thinks, a memento from Magenta, before he remembers himself as a whole person and not the funhouse mirror version he’d extracted from paradise.
‘How did you –‘ how did you laugh all this time, how could you forget about me, how could you leave me there to rot, how did it feel did you feel good did you love leaving your brother behind while you went away to l i v e ‘– survive?’
That’s a lie and Saeran wears it badly. He wants to scream, maybe break something. It’s not survival he’s after, it’s a confession, an admission of guilt. Not how his twin had lived, but why he wasn’t already dead. Still, he holds back, straightens his spine, waits for the words.
‘I had you,’ Saeyoung says. His voice is small, broken and raspy, coming from very far away, but it’s Saeyoung’s voice and, in a strange way, the words hurt more than simple rejection would have. Saeran can’t be angry in the face of this, but anger had also been the only thing he’d allowed himself to feel for the longest time. He feels neutered. Declawed. He can’t breathe. He is drowning on land and feels the pause ring sharply against his eardrums.
Saeyoung lips are cracked and bleeding. It matches his hair and Saeran doesn’t like to think about that.
‘Well,’ Saeyoung concedes, ‘I guess that might not be completely true.’
‘Yeah,’ Saeran says, because he doesn’t know what else to do. Talking, after so many hours spent in silence, is awkward and stilted, his voice cracking like a dry leaf. Yeah – I was trapped in a cult for years. Yeah – you never looked for me. Yeah – I hate you.
‘Yeah,’ Saeyoung agrees, perhaps with all those things.
Yeah – I’ve missed you.
Saeyoung smiles again. A couple of months ago Saeran would have found this infuriating, but his rage has been hollowed out, sucked clean along with his marrow (Xylophone boy; you can play a tune across his ribcage, use his desiccated body like an instrument; it’s an old role he can play well). This time Saeyoung’s smile is a garbled, dissonant wreck that looks about as bad as Saeran feels. It hits a high note inside his chest, a whining pitch that sets his teeth on edge.
‘I had what I imagined to be you.’ Sayoung pauses, considers the sentence. ‘I thought you were happy.’
That smile. Saeran thinks he understands now. It’s like muscle memory, but it’s not your memory or your body. It’s things your body learned to do by watching others, things you gleam from books and whispers and stories. Like: smiling makes people like you more. Or: girls like pink bedrooms and being served breakfast. Or even: you have to work hard and eventually you’ll be appreciated. Saeran’s favourite is this: putting one foot in front of the other; waking up every morning and getting out of bed and doing people things when all you want to do is die. Muscle memory by proxy.
Saeyoung doesn’t seem to be quite done yet. He sucks in a sharp, hissing breath before speaking again. It sounds like a whistle.
‘I had to imagine you happy. Because –‘ god don’t say it ‘– because, if I wasn’t happy and you weren’t happy, then…‘
The rest of the sentence tapers off, wounded and howling into the distance. Saeyoung is not strong enough to finish that thought, not now, and Saeran doesn’t want to think about it either. It had been honest and it raises welts inside his throat.
His hands clench and unclench neurotically in his lap. He feels like a wild animal sometimes, tense and eyeing the exit at every opportunity. It was a common look for everyone who spent enough time around Magenta. Somewhere, in another crisp room, sits V – prey-skinny, a sack of skin stretched out over a creeping emptiness, something strikingly familiar to him. A coiled expectancy or the fear of the hunted or both. Saeran can understand that.
This is what healing feels like: an endless stream of finding not only the traces shesheshesherika’d left in his flesh, but also the threads of hurt she’d used to tie him down to her trail of carnage, setting things up so that he’d still find his way to her through others. A masterful stroke, a final flourish to wounds new and old. Not even his hurt belongs fully to himself, has to be shared and split across who knows how many more.
Things Saeran wishes for: being hurt, something he can understand, seeing someone wear his face and bear his vitriol.
Saeyoung seems reluctant to play along, strung out and pumped full of drugs as he is, and just sighs and closes his eyes in surrender. He’s lying on his back, a violent streak of red against the mass of cotton sheets around him which had startled Saeran the first time he’d come in for a visit. If his head felt split open, the insides scooped up and replaced with a yearning emptiness, then Saeyoung was a bleeding artery all by himself: one giant trauma shaped like a person.
Things Saeran actually receives:
the uncomfortable awareness that he is both seen and unseen, that Saeyoung looks at him and sees double;
the knowledge that a separate, independent Saeran had thrived inside his brother’s bunker, inside his skin – eternally a twin, even in this odd liminality.
He tries to distract himself from the sudden feeling of twicehood
(like his insides have detached from his body and are floating in a void miles away from his skin; like half of him is no longer there and half is too slow to follow; like waking up one morning by yourself and ending the night by yourself and going on to live as one where you were once two; like having someone pilot your body when you’re overwhelmed)
and looks for textures in the room. It’s a neat little trick to focus his scrambled circuitry on important things, so he slides down into the chair and tries to remember what it feels like to have sensations in his limbs.
The room is sparsely decorated, but clean, and smells faintly of bleach and medication and all those other things you’d expect to find a hospital. The paint is peeling off in one of the corners, a small point of inattention in the otherwise immaculate hospital, but it's otherwise unremarkable. Some of the other rooms he’d managed to catch a glimpse of on his way in had been vibrant. People had brought in gifts and personal possessions to make their stay easier, but Saeyoung had nothing of the sort. Except for me, Saeran thinks, and is surprised at how easily the words form around that shapeless lump in the back of his throat.
There are also some wilting flowers in the one vase Jaehee had brought in at his (shy, stilted, small) request. Saeran makes a mental note to bring some new ones in. He doesn’t know why he does it, he’s pretty sure Saeyoung is pretty out of it most of these days (and probably doesn’t notice the specifics of the bouquet changes anyway), but hiding little messages in the gift helps him work through his feelings. It’s marigold today, a golden splash against the white on white furniture in the room. Grief. Honouring the dead. He had been feeling maudlin at the time.
And then there’s himself, sharp and anxious, wearing clothes that hang too loosely around his shoulders and several sharp realisations between his xylophone ribs.
One: he is suddenly aware of himself as an object in the room, as a puzzle Saeyoung is struggling to understand. Seen and unseen again, the split difference between their joint experiences.
Saeran is mentally tracing the serrated edge Magenta had left in his brain when he has the second realisation.
This is what healing is, part two: perspective. He thinks of the sun seeping through like a lighthouse inside his skull and wants to show Saeyoung how he sees the world from there: jagged and sharp, as much weapon as proof of trauma. The world looks broken from this angle, splintered into a before and after.
Three: Saeran really wishes Saeyoung had hurt him instead. Being told I lived because of you means that they’re both bleeding. Better me than you is a twin-thought, but a broken one too (a before and an after for everything; this is the wrong thought in the wrong brain).
‘What now?’
He hadn’t meant for the question to sound so lost, but old habits are hard to break.
‘Ah –‘ Saeyoung is still smiling ‘– that’s not the right question to ask.’
There’s a bit of giddiness in there, an eagerness to share whatever clever scheme he’s come up with, and this feels familiar too. Something feebly annoyed stirs in Saeran.
‘And what would that be?’
A weak, half-hearted shrug.
‘How do we keep going?’
A full-hearted hope, blooming gently across Saeyoung’s features.
Healing is also this: a pruning and a time for seeding. Things that grow in the dark reaches of soil.
It wouldn’t be the same, but neither were they.