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You were never those twins. The dressed-alike, hand-holding, speaking-your-own-language twins. You never cried when she went off to play with her own friends. And you never begged to go along when he took off to wander alone through the woods.
It's a myth that all soulmates are joined at the hip. You proved that, the two of you.
You wonder sometimes if your mother had twins on purpose. You fully believe that she is capable of anything, and body magic has always been her specialty. She calls you 'the happy accidents' but you stopped buying that sometime before you were twelve.
'Ain't nothing happen to Tasha Banes without her say-so,' you say, and you laugh because he laughs but one of your earliest memories is the day he fell off the stepladder and hit his head hard on the way down.
(He was only up there in the first place because you wanted to climb the tree and couldn't reach the first branch on your own so the whole thing is your fault / little girl, none of it is your fault.)
Mama wrapped him up in her aura and made her body grow as big as the world. She folded him into herself again to make him whole. She put your hands on his chest and told you to pray but your hands were so small, and his heart beat thready beneath your palms. Mama said, 'there's magic in you baby girl,' and you knew she didn't mean the same kind of magic that was in him but you didn't move, didn't look away and then it happened. Skin to skin, the lines between your bodies blurred and your mama's glow encompassed you both, all three, the entire world.
Five minutes later he was daring you to try the ladder. Five minutes after that the ladder was in splintery bits and sparks were flying and there was no more tree-climbing. Not until you were old enough to manage it with your own two hands. And then nothing could keep your feet on the ground, little boy.
You never stopped scaring her, did you? You let her be the one to know what it feels like, to carry the fear of that much loss.
(You let her carry the weight of it so that you didn't have to / sweet boy, no one blames you)
That was her first move in your ongoing negotiation, the start of the way you trade off your worldly weights: no need to double up when you've only got the one soul between you so you keep this innocence and she keeps that one, she and you and you and he.
You don't remember the first time Mama told you never to apologize for being who you are. You do remember the first time she told you, 'Don't go around shouting about this soulmate business, folks hear a story like that three towns over before you've finished telling it in the here and now.'
You're sitting in the car outside the Roadhouse when she says that, duffel bags at your feet and Miss Joanna already waving from the front door. It's summertime, no more school for what seems like ever and ever, and you'll be staying here awhile while your mama and Jo's mama take off on what they call 'a much-needed girls trip' never mind that neither of them is a girl anymore. Jo may be more than six years older than you but she's the only one even close to your age who knows about magic and stuff. It's been over a year since you saw her last and Mama knows that the two of you are bursting at the seams with wanting to tell her the news. Mama, though, she doesn't want you to end up a story.
That's what she says, anyway; 'Don't need folks talking about my babies like they talk about John's boys.' Maybe it's because of his well-known feelings regarding witches but Mama's voice always goes heavy when she talks about that man.
It's another thing you don't remember: the first time you heard tell of the Winchesters. It's the way you don't remember the first time you heard 'Good Night Moon' read out loud or 'Mississippi Goddam' roil from the speakers. It's just another intangible thread; the sound of your mother's voice and Nina Simone's voice and the voices of all the witches and hunters you grew up around, the whole great tapestry of origin stories that has no beginning and no end.
But you remember something, and you've told it to him often enough that now he remembers it too. It's connected by one of those fathomless threads to the memory of Mama and the Roadhouse and Jo. You were in Kansas, in Miss Mizzy's house. Only you didn't call her that just yet. Over the years she would become good friends with Mama but at this first meeting she made you nervous. You were used to your mama and your brother looking right into your heart but you didn't so much like it from a stranger.
That's how you ended up the bearer of this memory. Much as you wanted to run and hide, someone had to keep an eye on this lady who seemed way too nice for a stranger who looked into your eyes and told you things about yourself you never meant to say out loud. She said something to him about the robin but instead of making him cry, the way he had been all since it happened, he looked up at her and smiled. That didn't seem right to you so you stayed right there in the room with them while he ran all over the house, whooping and hollering and occasionally calling back, 'Yes ma'am!' whenever the psychic lady broke off talking to Mama to call out, 'Little boy you lay a finger on that crystal I'ma whack you with a spoon!'
You were mad at your mother for bringing you here without telling you why, and it was years before you'd piece it together. That Mama had hauled you all the way to Lawrence because she was scared, and that she was scared because of the two of you.
What the psychic said was supposed to make Mama feel better, you could tell, but it didn't work right away.
'How can they be soulmates?' Mama said. 'They're…'
You didn't know what soulmates was, but you knew how that sentence would end. They're not those twins.
But the psychic didn't seem to know how the sentence was supposed to end, which made you wonder if she really was psychic after all because she told Mama, 'Soulmates doesn't necessarily mean that kind of love. It's about balance, and unity. And power.'
On the first day of first grade, when you'd asked, Mama answered you with words that sounded like she'd practised them: 'They don't put brothers and sisters in the same class.'
You'd accepted that with a shrug and let her kiss you and then you each ran off to stand in your separate lines. You didn't even wave goodbye to her; why would you? Five minutes later you sent a robin to peek in the window of her classroom and say hi to her. And even though her eyes don't glow like yours, when you borrowed the robin's eyes to look at her you could see the words she was thinking back at you, just like always.
That poor robin. It seems impossible for one little bird to be so heavy but you'll carry the weight of him to your grave, won't you? You asked him to do too much and you felt his tiny heart explode in his tiny body and you felt the way a light went out of the universe because of you.
You didn't know that down the hall, another teacher was saying, 'What's wrong Alicia?' which was the first you knew that you were crying. You were crying and you couldn't stop and you didn't know why because you didn't feel sad, you only felt afraid. More afraid than you'd ever felt since that day with the tree and the ladder.
Mama told the psychic all of that story. Then the psychic said that word for the third time. Soulmates. And though you still didn't know what it meant, hearing it again made something kind of settle inside you. You went still and stopped fussing with your itchy dress. You were little enough that adults still said things around you so the psychic was looking right at you though she was really talking to Mama.
'Some are like what I see in your two, born already joined up, naturally in balance. Some, though…' She sighed. 'Some are made along the way. There were these boys I met a ways back. Brothers. Their mother had just died and their father came to me, looking for some answers. Little Sammy wan't nothing but a mite, soul barely attached to his body but lord, he burned so bright. And his big brother…well, what he'd been through?' She shook her head. 'Sometimes I wonder if I did right by them. If I shouldn't've told their daddy about any of it. Not what's out there in the dark, not what I saw in his two boys.'
And Mama was sitting there just as unmoving as you, but it was like all the jangles that had finally left your body so that you could be still had taken up in her and she was only just containing them, keeping still to keep from shaking. Very quietly, she asked, 'You wouldn't be talking about John Winchester's boys, now, would you?'
You came back to sit by her then. You'd felt the stillness downstairs and come creeping back down yourself, lowering yourself onto the plush and colourful rug right beside your sister. She smiled at you, and you felt it take wing in your chest and you finally knew what to call it. You felt your soul settle when he smiled back. And then, even though you had never been those twins, you reached out for him and you took her hand.
You're teenagers before you join the dots up the rest of the way. Before you give more than a passing thought to the fact that when people talk about the Winchester Boys – and do people ever love to talk about them – they're talking about more than just myths and legends. They are talking about actual, flesh and blood humans (your friend Jo had plenty to say about that flesh, too) racking up a headcount even your father finds impressive.
Because, oh yeah, you have a father now. He's a white dude – but then you'd always figured that – and he's a hunter – which was a total surprise to both of you no matter how many times you say you knew.
You don't get close to him. Hunters don't do close. 'I'm so glad Mom didn't raise us like that,' you say, and she nods, but her eyes tell you what she won't say out loud.
You and Mom have magic. You and Dad, could you have had hunting?
You start to spend more time with Mom, after you find out about Dad. But also, weirdly, less time with each other. 'You're growing up,' Mom reminds you, kissing your cheek which is all she can reach anymore, and you both watch her curls bounce and disappear into her jeep. Her eyes still call you sweet boy but her mouth never does anymore.
You're growing up, and anyway you were never those twins.
Mom finds you stretched out on his bed, reading a fashion magazine, the first night he ever breaks curfew. 'He's fine,' you tell her, tone just as brisk as it needs to be to say Don't ask me to tell you details. Mom comes and sits by your feet and you stare hard at the page, eyes burning until all the lipsticks blur and transform to bloody gashes.
'I am so beyond grateful that he's not into girls,' you tell your mother through numb lips. It's the closest you have ever and will ever come to discussing it with her. You drop the magazine and it flops open on your chest, like a clumsy embrace. You'd been staring at the models on every page, cataloguing their perfections and thinking you would rather compare yourself to each and every one of them than to even one plain, normal girl he might have brought home. You yourself can hardly flirt with a guy for more than five minutes before the guilt stops it from being any fun.
It's sometime after you start picking up the guilt-vibe from her that the two of you start hunting together. You don't talk about it, not with your words or with your eyes, it's like a decision that was always there, just waiting for you to trip over it. It's perfect and it's everything you want, though you both pretend it's not.
It's the answer to a question you never thought to ask. You're good with no question marks on the page, but you…
She starts asking everywhere you go for stories about those famous, world-saving, demon-dealing and – depending on who's telling the tales – weirdly co-dependent brothers. You listen and you watch and you wish you could take that curiosity away from her.
Not like you don't get it, don't wonder what it would be like to meet them, don't let some of what you hear about them figure into what you think about during your alone time. But that's all it is to you; fantasy.
(Figures that once you actually meet them, fantasy takes a major back seat to reality, god damn.)
(You don't actually want to do anything with either of the Winchester Boys, but you keep the argument going for weeks about who would get who; it's nice to mention their names and see him smile, for a change.)
This place you've found where intimacy and safety can exist at the same time without edging each other out…as soon as you start to notice how good it is, it starts to feel like an illusion. Like something in a dream that's just close enough to plausible so in the instant before you open your eyes, you believe that it's real.
You wonder if this is the kind of thing you sell your soul for; to keep everything you want within reach.
You know he wishes he could take it away from you, this cloud you carry around that never seems to cast him in its shade. You think he's even ready to trade. Little girl… he wants to say, wants to offer you something nice in exchange and shoulder instead that fear you've been carrying around ever since you were in truth what he still longs to call you.
You tell her that she's wrong, and you tell her that nothing's wrong.