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Your name is Tommyinnit, and you are very sure of three things.
1. You miss your best friend.
2. This ravine is too small.
3. Your brother is dying.
Well, okay, he's not really dying, but it sure feels like it. He doesn't sleep (you're not sure what he does instead), he barely eats, and he chainsmokes in a little offshoot of the main ravine. He looks like hell, he doesn't shower, and you can hear the way his breath rattles in his lungs.
Another clarification: he's not your brother in the sense that most people would take that term. You're not blood related, you've never even met his father, but he is your brother in every other way possible. He means that much to you, he occupies that space in your life, you would go through hell and back to keep him by your side.
He's your brother and he's fucking dying. He's your brother and he's dying and you can't help him because you don't know how.
Your name is Tommyinnit, you are sixteen years old, and you have no experience with anything of this nature. You don't know how to help. You want to help. You need to help.
For fuck's sake, he's dying.
So, one day, when he's already halfway through a pack of cigarettes, you find him sitting against a wall in his little smoking room (because he cares more about you than he does himself right now, because he knows how much smoke can damage someone's lungs, because even if he won't spare himself by god he's gonna spare you). He looks up at you, and his dark circles make his eyes look bruised and sunken. He looks like he's dying because he is. You're sure of it.
You hold out your hand, and you say that it's a lovely day outside (you know this because you've checked) and that you want to go outside and look at flowers and greenery because the ravine is getting stuffy, and won't he come with?
He looks at you.
(You hate the way he looks now. You remember the way he used to look when you met, when he picked you up off the street and smiled at you and let you be swept along in his plans. You wish he looked the way he did before exile, before everything, before L'Manburg, because even the country you helped found had sapped the life from his frame and voice and eyes and there's nothing that could ever come close to being worth that.)
He looks back down at his pack of cigarettes.
(You hate those goddamn cigarettes. You're not sure where he gets them. You're pretty sure Techno brings them, and this makes you want to hate Techno more than you've ever hated anyone, even though you've heard your brother's liquid voice more times than you can count and you know at your core that he could make even Techno do things Techno would never dream of. You still want to hate Techno anyways. You don't hate Techno.)
He says something about not today.
In this moment, you can make a choice.
You can turn and walk away and leave him to his cigarettes and self-destruction. You can turn and walk away like you have every other time he's rejected your offers, your words, your tentative outstretched hand. You can turn and walk away and nobody could ever blame you, because for all your maturity you are still sixteen and expecting you to be able to help someone in this kind of crisis is cruel.
Or you can do something. It might not work. It might not help. But you can still do it.
Your brother is dying in front of you.
So you do something.
You grab his arm and pull him to his feet, loudly (you're always loud) asserting that he's getting up no matter what. He's too startled to vocally protest, but you can see every word he could ever say written in his face. There's a cigarette in his mouth and the half-empty pack still in his hands and no matter how much you want to you don't rip that self harm away from him. You pull him from that little smoke-filled room (he's taller than you and once he was heavier but he hasn't been eating and if he was shirtless you're sure you could count every one of his ribs) and thank fucking everything and anything he lets you do it.
You pull him through the ravine and up the twisting stairs, him nearly tripping over his own feet, your hand clinging tightly to the crook of his elbow. His eyes stay cast downwards, his body still trying to curl in on itself. He doesn't say anything. You keep up a running string of commentary, telling him over and over that the two of you are going outside, that you need fresh air, that you don't want to be alone outside just in case.
(You do not say: you are dying. You do not say: I'm scared and I don't know what to do. You do not say: I care about you more than you care about yourself.)
You open the door to the ravine exit, and your brother blinks and covers his eyes in response to the sunlight. He hasn't been outside in days, and it looks almost painful.
You smile, you laugh, you nudge him in the shoulder and say words that don't register in your own mind, and he smiles.
He's smiling.
(Your name is Tommyinnit, you are sixteen years old, you are a former vice president, you are the brother of Wilbur Soot, you may be a child but you know more and have seen more than anyone ever deserves to.)
(Your name is Tommyinnit, and you are very sure of three things:
1. You want to help him.
2. You need to help him.
3. You are going to help him.)
(You do not know this yet, but you fail.)
You know this now: he's smiling, he is sitting on the ground, he is pressing his hands into the grass. The cigarettes are in his pocket, the one in his mouth is crushed on the ground. There's wind in his hair and a little more color on his face and even though his smile shows no teeth and would be nothing to anyone else you know that it is there.
You aren't sure of this: you're helping him.
(In the end, you only slowed his fall, but it's okay.)
(It was cruel to expect you to save him.)