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They came into the world together. They were supposed to be together forever. Until he messed up. He ruined everything. He was weak. He was a coward, and he knows it. But he was also a child, a child who abandoned the one good thing in his life because he was scared. He fucked up, and he knew it as soon as he pressed down with the knife. Knew it as soon as the match was tossed. Knew it as soon as he woke up in bed. Alone.
Jeremiah knew he had made the biggest mistake in his life when the comforting heat of his brother was no longer at his back, wrapped around him. No longer protecting him from the sting of a fist, and the cold of the night. Protecting him from his own mind.
There was no going back. There was no way to take back the tear in their relationship. No way to take back the pain. No way to take back the love he clearly turned to hatred. No way to ever look in the mirror again without the crushing guilt of leaving him alone. Jerome was strong, and Jeremiah could only wish he had a fraction of the strength he possessed. Jerome was strong. Jerome was protection. Jerome was safety. And Jerome was his big brother. He took care of him when no one else would. And Jeremiah left him. He was selfish, and he would never be able to make up for his mistake. Never make up for his betrayal.
Even now as the memory of his body falling. Of his smile, cold and lifeless, stared up in the grey overcast of Gotham City’s sky. The dread was in his stomach twisting his stomach. He did this to Jerome. Every life Jerome had taken, Jeremiah had taken. The blood on Jerome's hands were on his. If it weren’t for him none of this would’ve happened. He did this to Gotham. He created the monstrosity in his brother’s mind that drove him to insanity. He drove him to this madness. The same madness that edged Jeremiah's mind. That screamed for him to see what Jerome saw. To be what Jerome wanted him to be for once. To not disappoint Jerome for once. To be the brother he should’ve been for once.
Jeremiah’s hands itched for a drink. And another. And another. Drink after drink after drink. None of them dulled the pain. None of them made the memories hurt any less as they raced through his mind. The sound of the body falling on the car. The briefest moment of hope in Jeremiah’s heart when the body jolted, of how he thought Jerome was going to bounce back up cackling. He didn’t. Jeremiah killed him. If Jeremiah never left Jerome would still be alive. His arms would encircle him and he would be his big brother. He would have that annoying smile pressed behind his ear and Jerome told him the dream from the night before. Probably about so strange combination of food themed animals that could fly. He would have someone to pry him away from work when he forgot to himself, reminding him there was a world outside of the building his mind continuously tried to create. He would have stability that he craved. He would have that person who would’ve understood all of him.
-
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
Of everything we've been through
-
Jeremiah remembered the first time Lila had hurt him. He doesn’t think she really remembered it, but it led down a path there was no recovering from. After that Zach became more physical. Previously he might’ve slapped their hands a bit too hard when they reached out to take cookies, or pushed them aside a little too roughly when they stood too close to him. Just small things. It was like Zach and Lila fed off each other, when one became more rough with the twins, so would the other. It was a painful cycle. One Jeremiah still has yet to recover from.
As Zach’s open palm turned into a close fist and Lila turned from pushing them to the ground turned into throwing glass bottles at their heads, the twin reacted differently. Jerome pushed buttons, showed them they couldn’t break him. Jeremiah stayed silent, and hid away burying himself in his studies. Jerome stood in the spotlight showcasing the scars decorating his body like badges of honor, and Jeremiah built a maze around himself to hide in, forever alone, not even Jerome could enter.
The first time Lila had caused them pain. It didn’t seem real. Jeremiah had been on the floor squirming to escape Jerome’s hands as they tickled him. Shrieking laughter as he jumped to race across the trailer to where Lila laid nursing what Jeremiah later learned was a hangover. Something he learned too quickly.
He wasn’t sure how it happened. Maybe he had woken her up, or maybe she was already awake and glaring at the children she brought into the world, but soon when Jeremiah ran a tad too close to the couch she had been lounging on her hand had reached out and tugged harshly on his leg. His head had slammed against the table, but she didn’t seem to care. Instead she slurred a harsh, “Shut up.” before flipping over and facing the back of the couch. She didn’t care about his hiccuping gasps for air, or the blood that started to run down his face. Didn’t care that his eyes were unable to focus on anything.
He was eight.
“Miah!” Jerome didn’t care about what their mother had just said. He was busy being a good big brother. His hand touched Jeremiah’s body, not quite sure what to do at first, but soon he was pressing a cool paper towel to his head that had been soaked in cold water. He helped Jeremiah stand not wanting to risk their mother’s wrath anymore. Knowing that Jeremiah needed to be away from her. Jeremiah doesn’t think Jerome ever really cared about himself in the way a normal person was. Jerome seemed to see bodies as a mask for the person inside. He tried explaining to Jeremiah one time how humans are just our own imagination, but Jeremiah hadn’t listened well because he was trying to make a new maze.Jerome had brought him to sit on the lawn chairs in front of the trailer as Jerome risked the inside.
Looking back on their short time together, only ten years worth of memories, Jeremiah wonders why things went this way. Why had he ever though Jerome would let Lila and Zach hurt him. His little twelve year old self was so sure that Jerome would one day be like Jeremiah and in that short laps of strength, Zach or Lila would give him a well timed hits and he’d die with a fractured skull as he bled out on the floor, yet he had never shown cowardly behavior towards him, only ever being the stronger twin. Jerome always would’ve protected him, and he did until Jeremiah betrayed him.
-
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
-
Jeremiah’s head throbbed with the memory. He could still remember the awful feeling of blood in his eye. He wanted another drink. And another. And another. Drink after drink after drink. Each one with a promise of being the last one.
They never were the last. Always another sip, another pour, another bottle.
-
And the memories bring back, memories bring back you
-
“Com’on, ‘Miah, I’m bored.” Jerome hugged him from behind and started to nuzzle against his neck and hair. It wasn’t a thing Jeremiah was ever fond of. He didn’t like being touched without warning. He didn’t like not knowing who was touching him, although Jerome was the only was ever this tactile with him, or gentle for that matter. Lila occasionally mistakes him for Jerome and would beat him up a little, asking why he was sitting around in the trailer instead of out working, but she got better at it when Jerome would cause a ruckus whenever he came to find Jeremiah with bruises he wasn’t around for.
It’s not that he liked it when Jeremiah got hurt, but he liked being the one who had marked him. Sometimes, when Jerome felt that someone else had taken up too much of Jeremiah’s time he would do things like this.
“You’re mine, baby bro.” Jerome placed a loud smack on Jeremiah’s cheek as he hugged him from behind. The words weren’t loud but Jeremiah heard them easily. Jerome had started glaring at Petunia. He could tell, but Jerome had this particularly harsh glare that whenever anyone saw it they had these tells. Petunia, for example, pressed her lip tight together and looked away from the two. That could be contributed to the affection Jerome was showing him. Jeremiah has found that it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but when she glanced up her face didn’t heat up like she had accidentally stumbled upon an intimate scene, but her body tensed and eyes widened, Jeremiah knew it was from the heat of Jerome’s glare.
“I-I need to, um, go, bye…” His name died on her lips and she all but ran away, leaving half of the laundry still on the line to dry.
“I don’t like her.” Jerome said against the shell of his ear. The vibration almost tickled, but Jeremiah was still tense to laugh because of how much he hated when Jerome did stuff like that. They’ve discussed it before, and whenever they discuss it it would get a bit better for a few days, he’d have a nice conversation with Billy or Petunia, but before long Jerome would come and do things like this.
Jerome’s arms were a shackle and the only way for Jeremiah to talk to him face to face was to turn in his arms and then place his own behind Jerome’s neck. If his arms weren’t in the right placement Jerome would continuously interrupt him. Jeremiah hated being interrupted.
“Why did you do that? I thought you agreed to let me make some friends,” His voice was hard, but still spoken low because this wasn’t a discussion for someone else to hear, not that anyone would want to come close enough to hear their conversations. The rest of the carnival thought they were demon children. Jeremiah was too smart for his own good, and Jerome was chaos incarnate. Jerome was smart too; he didn’t show it in ways Jeremiah did, but it was clear to anyone who has truly met him. He was word smart, while Jeremiah was number smart. Jerome used to joke they were two parts of a whole supervillain.
“You don’t want to be her friend; I don’t trust her.” Jerome said this as if it was an obvious statement.
“I can be friends with someone you don’t trust, Jerome. Not everything revolves around you.” This was the wrong thing to say. See, to Jerome, everything about Jeremiah’s life does, in fact, revolve around him, just as most things in his life revolve around Jeremiah. Everything was supposed to circle back to each other. That was how their life has been before, that’s how their life should be now, and that’s how their life should be forever. The two of them against the world.
Jerome’s face darkened, and suddenly they no longer felt like the same height, Jerome felt taller. His fingers tightened and curled into Jeremiah’s side. He knew by tomorrow there would be purple bruises with jagged little red crescents from his nails.
“She is trying to separate us, ‘Miah.” Jerome’s voice sounded almost desperate, but they had both become good actors, Jeremiah had to question if that was truly what her goal was. Their mother had tried to seperate them, what if she was the same way.
“Maybe you’re reading her wrong.” Jeremiah said, but in order to make Jerome not feel like he was choosing her over him, Jeremiah placed a soft kiss to his cheek and gave him a tight hug. Jerome stayed tense, but the way his arms loosened just slightly, it was clear that he liked the hug, and wanted to hug back. He didn’t. He stayed tense and made him promise to not be around her without Jerome.
About a week later they had found a bunch of drugs in her trailer and the police had come to take her away because she had killed someone while trying to get drugs Jerome had been right. If she was to kill someone because of drugs, what would’ve happened if Jerome wasn’t around whenever they spoke during her detox?
-
Everybody hurts sometimes
Everybody hurts someday
But everything gon' be alright
-
When Jeremiah left his heart raced. He wasn’t sure if it was excitement or fear. He had always been so afraid. Jerome used to help him calm down when the fear became overwhelming. He would hold his hand. Let him feel his heartbeat. Jerome would take big dramatic breaths that, when Jeremiah was calm, would giggle and playfully push his brother away before grabbing his hand again, one hand would intertwine their fingers and the other would gently wrap around his wrist.
In the car that day Zach had yelled at him when he couldn’t stop crying, and his breath was fast and short. It didn’t help, it made it worse. As he got older Jeremiah found things that helped. Alcohol for one, but he was twelve and alcohol was no longer as accessible as it was at the circus. The car smelled of stale cigarettes and Zach smelled of raw meat. It was the metallic bloody smell Jerome sometimes had lingering around them. The smell wasn’t fresh and it made his stomach turn in. Jeremiah tried to distract himself, but he couldn’t. He kept imagining Jerome chasing after him, holding a blood crusted knife to his throat.
“I was going to protect you from everything, but, lil bro, you didn’t trust me enough, did ya? No, you didn’t…” He wouldn’t finish the sentence. He would let the knife do the talking. His skin would cut easily, Lila always said his skin was too thin for his own good. He could see Jerome dripping his finger into the blood pouring from his neck and would attempt to solve the mazes taped to the wall. Jeremiah wished that would be where his imagination would run out, but it kept supplying more. It chased him for what seemed like hours, the clock said it had only been ten minutes. His thoughts were too loud, too fast.
Zach wasn’t a good driver. By the end of the car ride to the new boarding school he was to attend, Jeremiah’s mind had replaced the image of his body being carved for his brother amusement, to being covered in glass like a pincushion with his skin darkly charred as the car was upside on the side of the road, with black smoke rising high and thick around him.
“Is this the brilliant student you’ve told us about?” A man asked as Jeremiah pulled a small rucksack that contained all his belongings, which was mostly his mazes, and some of Jerome’s gloves. He hated that he brought them, but they were just laying there. And Jerome was asleep, yet still reaching out for him. He grumbled a little when Jeremiah pulled away from him, like he just wanted the brother he loved back. He saw him sometimes, but other times he scared him. Terrified him. Yet, Jerome was his big brother. He had protected him. Loved him. Maybe, in his own way he still did, but Jeremiah wasn’t sure he could handle being loved by this Jerome. This Jerome loved viciously, like how Lila and Zach loved each other. Jeremiah couldn’t be like that. But these gloves also belonged to the old Jerome. That one wasn’t ever scary. And Jeremiah couldn’t stand to part with him forever.
So in he walked to St. Ignatius, and he hid. And wished he hadn’t because he didn’t realize how cold and alone he’d feel without Jerome.
-
There's a time that I remember, when I never felt so lost
When I felt all of the hatred was too powerful to stop
-
It was late when Jeremiah woke up to Jerome excitedly shaking him. He had bright red swiped across his cheekbone. He had been in a deep sleep with his hands still tense with tiredness, and Jerome held them so tight it almost hurt. Jeremiah when awake doesn’t like physical contact, but when he’s asleep he likes an octopus, grabbing anything and everything within reach and without Jerome, which he usually woke up holding, he instead was holding on tightly to a pillow with a small pool of drool.
“Miah! Come look at what I found!” Jerome was excitedly tugging on his arm, practically pulling off their small mattress, “Wakey wakey, and follow me, Eggy!” Jerome sang as Jeremiah finally stood up, shoving his glasses on. Jerome had saved up his stolen money for a month straight to afford the glasses. They were the cheapest frames they could find, but they didn’t give him a headache from them being the wrong prescription.
“Yes, I’m coming.” Jeremiah grumble, voice still scratchy from being freshly woken up. He hadn’t known what he expected to find with Jerome all but pulled him into the nearby woods.
He can say what he hadn’t expected to find. A small animal, too mutilated to truly see what it was. It may have been a squirrel from the face, but maybe a rabbit? The ears and tail had been cut off and there were dark black blood stains lit only from the moonlight. He hadn’t expected to find three similar smaller creatures of that sort laying next to a bloody pair of boxer cutters. If the piece of them had been reassembled like a sort of sick jigsaw puzzle Jeremiah doubted he would’ve understood what those were either.
In theory, Jeremiah knew some nights Jerome snuck out. Sometimes he would return with the sharp metallic tang of blood. But whenever he tried to imagine what Jerome was doing it was never like this. It was never this bloody and chaotic. Somehow in his mind Jerome had it at a dissection table, like his online frog dissection labs that were required for his biology class.
“Neat, huh!” Jerome preened as if he discovered something amazing. And Jeremiah wished with all his heart that he would have looked away from the bloody images in his mind, but they were permanently imprinted there. He also wished with his entire being that he didn’t react the way he did. Maybe if he hadn’t reacted that way, he could still see the light fading from Jerome's eyes, as Jeremiah so heartlessly said, “This is gross and messy, can I go back to bed, Jer?”
“Yeah, but don’t you wanna look at it just a bit more? Don’t you think it's just a little cool?” Jerome prompted trying to get something out of Jeremiah that he just wasn’t giving.
“Yes, Jer, it’s very neat, but I’m tired.”
“I could show you. You can come out with me. I’ll be neater next time.” Jeremiah hadn’t realised how lonely Jerome was. They both knew that Jeremiah wasn’t like Jerome in terms of socialising. Jerome thrived being the center of attention on stage. And while Jeremiah craved the center of attention, he didn’t care for stranger’s attention, he wanted to be the only person those he loved would pay attention to whenever he was around. Those he loved consisting only of Jerome. The sadness in Jerome’s voice made Jeremiah stop thinking about the scene before him and finally face his brother. The blood must have been some that was on the back of his hand. Jeremiah licked his thumb and wiped away the dried blood, scratching some of the bit that stayed after leaving a small red bit of skin in his wake on jerome’s face.
“I’m happy for you, Jer. I’ll come with you some night, okay?” Jeremiah asked, giving Jerome a small kiss on the cheek and initiating a hug. He wanted Jerome to know that even if he wasn’t as fascinated as he was he still cared, and he still wanted to be involved. It was just like how Jerome would solve the mazes he created. He was his little brother and he wanted to support him, even if he started to worry about how large the animals he would cut were. How smart they would become. How human they would become.
-
Now my heart is like an ember and is lighting up the dark
I'll carry these torches for ya that you know I'll never drop
-
Jeremiah wasn’t actually sure when silent tears turned into heart wrenching sobs. Wasn’t sure when exactly he started watching every single YouTube video of Jerome Valeska he could find, avoiding all of them that contained him. It was too painful to see. While he suspected towards the end that Jerome would never actually kill him, that he just wanted to make a statement, Jeremiah still hated to think that he had been willing to try and kill him, when Jerome had only ever loved him, for the most part.
Why couldn’t he have been a good brother? Why didn’t he insist upon creating this rift between them, as he held the blade to his throat, and threw the match on the bed, and spun the lies that all eventually led him astray. Led him away from Jerome, the only true love he has ever known. Jerome’s love was an all-consuming fire. It burned brighter and blinded everyone who came too close. It burned hot, scorching anyone he loved. And it was gorgeous, and Jeremiah can’t believe he had been the fool to call the firefighters to destroy beautiful destruction. That is the best way to describe Jerome, beautiful destruction.
Jeremiah wished he hadn’t made the choice. What he would give to spend just one more night on a too small, dirty twin bed mattress with his brother’s body heat providing warmth because Lila had the only thick blanket, they were left with the clothes as a blanket. He would give anything for one more day of his coloring on the floor as Jerome used markers to color flowers onto his back. He missed the way they used to doodle on pages drawing what their futures would be like together. The drawings always had one thing in common, they were always together. Always.
Jeremiah wished he could go back in time and undo whatever it was that made him think leaving was the best course of action. So that he and Jerome never would’ve ended up where they are today. Both hidden underground, and one with a heartbeat, and one without.