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He stares through the window.
A lone streetlight is illuminating a patch of road far down the street, but the night itself is black and starless; nothing more than a wide expanse of emptiness. He’s not sure how much more he can take.
The air inside his room tastes stale. He wants to crack the window open, or maybe just shatter it until the glass rains down onto the floor and he can climb out and head somewhere else. Across the street, over the train tracks, far away.
But he won't.
Like a gunshot, a floorboard creaks in the hallway and makes him swear. "Fuck off," he says, out of jumpiness more than anything, but he doesn't bother to think of all the consequences coming his way if the wrong person is walking by.
He’s lucky this time. It's only Kobra, and he tiptoes forward quietly. Poison can tell by the sound of his footsteps that he stops and stands in the doorway, then says, "What are you doing?"
"You forgot to step over the board," Poison says in response. He doesn't turn around.
"I know.” A pause. “Can I sit with you?"
Poison shrugs.
He must take that as a yes, because after a moment, he can hear socks padding across the floor. After stopping to pick up a book splayed out on the rug and placing it gently on the nightstand, he climbs on Poison’s bed. The mattress frame creaks softly as he leans against the headboard and draws his knees up close. "What are you doing?" he repeats.
He should know by now that he’s never going to get a straight answer.
Poison, never once looking at him, wills his hands to remain still before he answers. His ever-present enemies, they tremble all the same no matter how hard he tries, and all he says is, "I'm going to get out of here one day.”
"Out of the house?"
Maybe. Maybe the house, maybe the suburbs, maybe the town. Maybe the city, maybe the country, maybe his own head. "Nevermind," he hears himself saying. "It doesn’t matter."
Kobra shakes his head, and when Poison senses the lecture coming on, all he can do is close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose. "You always--" Kobra begins, but Poison cuts him off.
"I don't want to hear it.”
Kobra sighs, but he shuts up, and that’s enough for the moment. Poison keeps his eyes shut as Kobra moves beside him and then nudges him to the side. "Scoot over."
"Why?"
"I wanna see what you were looking at."
"There's nothing," Poison says, and it’s the truth to him, but he makes room anyway. Kobra cranes his neck to stare up out the window, and Poison finally opens his eyes to watch his brother's face as he scans the sky. After a minute, Kobra moves the blinds aside like they’re the only thing holding him back from some kind of grand realization.
Poison wants to tell him he’s not going to find anything. There’s only that inky vortex of night, too far away to be attainable. Maybe that’s a good thing.
But it doesn’t sit right with Kobra. "There must be something," he says. His eyes search for anything he thinks would be of significance to Poison, but it’s a waste of time. Stargazing is just as lonely as glancing in the mirror. “Or you wouldn’t be looking.”
Easy for him to say.
After a while, Poison can’t take it anymore. "What do you think about wings?" he says instead. The question itself is a distraction, but he can’t deny that it's been on his mind the whole time.
"What about them?"
"As tattoos. Black ones, maybe."
Kobra doesn’t press, but Poison can see how much he wants to. "They're fine, I guess," his brother says eventually, skepticism strong across his face. "Why?"
"I was just wondering." The healing ink on Poison's back prickles and he looks away.
For a while, they stare up through the smudged window together at the depthless night sky. Even with his brother by his side, nothing up there holds any worth. Poison's soul doesn't feel lighter, his head doesn't feel clearer. If anything, he's emptier the longer he looks.
"When was the last time you went out of the house?"
It comes too fast, too out of the blue. Poison looks at him harshly. "Why does it matter?"
"I don't know. I just worry about you sometimes.”
“Well, don’t.”
“You know I have to.”
At that, Poison chooses to ignore him--something easy after all the practice he’s had through the years--and snaps the blinds shut. The resulting darkness is so thick that only one sliver of light breaks through from the hallway, peeking underneath the door to his room. Kobra glances at him but doesn’t say anything out loud. His eyes say enough.
“Do you ever think about leaving?” Poison asks. With a half-hearted glance around his room, he realizes there’s only one thing in here that he would ever miss.
“What?”
“Just packing up. Taking your stuff and going.” Maybe not even packing up. There’s nothing of his that he believes is worth keeping, after all. It can all be damned to hell with the rest of this fucking house.
“No,” Kobra says, and Poison knows he’s being honest. He’s got far more to live for here than Poison does, anyway. “Do you?”
“Every day.”
He just wishes he was brave enough to do it.
“We could go together,” Kobra offers, and Poison can’t help but have his shoulders jump in a laugh.
“You’re only seventeen.”
“So?”
“You’re still in high school. You can’t go anywhere.”
“I would drop out and go with you.” He leans against Poison’s shoulder and the weight of his head is heavy. “They couldn’t make me stay.”
The pledge, as little as it is, makes something inside Poison crack. “They could,” he says, but only to distract from the emotions gathering up within the cavity of his chest.
“I’d find a way around it.” He’s quiet for a moment, and Poison can see the solemnity of his thinking. The way that his little brother is already invested in the idea makes him feel things that he can’t name.
Poison looks down, but the room is so dark that he can barely see his feet. Most of the time he likes it that way; now is the exception. It swallows everything with the blackness of it, gives him the sensation of being lost alone in the desert, blinded by the isolation of it all. He almost wants to open the blinds again.
But after a single glance, Kobra beats him to it, and he doesn’t stop at the blinds, either. He lifts the window, and though the frame groans, it slides up after his third heave. “There,” he says, dusting off his hands, and Poison can’t look him in the eye.
The moon seems impossibly close now, and the buzzing of cicadas and the smell of wet grass is suddenly too much for him. Poison stands up and walks to his dresser. He should’ve known he wouldn’t have the guts to do it.
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t... ” Poison begins, but he doesn’t quite know how to articulate the feelings that keep stirring somewhere within the pit of his stomach. He’s never been good at explaining himself, and he thinks that one day soon it’d be better just to stop trying altogether.
He can feel his brother watching as he braces himself against the dresser, hands gripping the edge to keep them anchored and head hung to avoid the mirror. “I wouldn’t tell on you if you ran away,” Kobra says quietly.
“Don’t call it running away.”
“If you left. Moved out. However you want me to say it. I wouldn’t tell.”
“I know.”
With the window pushed up, Poison can hear the faraway cries of some kind of nighthawk. They break up the silence, but not enough. There’s something unfinished about it, but he can’t tell if the missing piece lies far beyond the confines of this room or if it’s somewhere deep inside of him.
“You need to clean this windowsill better,” his brother comments, inspecting the dust across his finger, and the offhandedness of it makes Poison smile. Not a full smile, but enough that Kobra can see it through the mirror.
“I don’t clean it at all,” he says.
“I can tell.”
Poison wonders what it would be like if he did leave for good. His room forever preserved in layers of dust, years after his departure, a museum of failure. It’s not like anybody would come in to clean it, anyway. It wouldn’t be important to anyone.
Except maybe Kobra.
But, like always, these fleeting moments of calm can never last. Footsteps sound in the hallway again, shattering the fugitive peace of their moment, and everything falls back into the same sick, splintering place as before. “You should go,” Poison tells him, not looking up. “You’ll get in trouble.”
Defiantly, Kobra stays put, and the way he’s sitting cross-legged on the bed with his lips pursed reminds Poison of a disobedient child. The role he never had growing up, because Poison already had it filled from the moment he was born. “I don’t care.”
His declaration is simple, but it just makes Poison shake his head. “You better care,” he says, partly a warning, partly a jest, “Or you’ll end up like me.”
One of the worst threats anyone could give.
Kobra sighs, and all the fight goes out of him in that simple exhale. “I’m leaving the window open,” he says, standing up, and Poison acts like he doesn’t hear him. “Go to bed soon. And get a clock that works.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.” He flips Kobra off, but after seventeen years, they both know that this isn’t one of the times he means it. “Finish your homework.”
“Maybe.”
After he walks out, it’s too quiet. It always is when he’s gone--his brother’s presence is like a momentary reminder that something in his life is still okay. Maybe not the best, but better than nothing.
And it’s then, that moment, that he knows he can’t just run away. This house, this town, this city--they may not mean anything to him, but his brother does. His brother means the world, and Poison suddenly can’t fathom the idea of leaving behind the only person that he gives a damn about.
So maybe he’ll leave another day. Maybe he can ride it out for a couple more months. Maybe.
Poison shuts the door and goes to bed without closing the window.