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Sometimes I feel like you and I are completely different people, Techno hummed to himself.
“Will you put that down?”
At the sound of another voice shattering the steady stream of murmurings that filled his own mind, Techno glanced up from the swath of blank papers before him. His eyebrow was raised, forehead wrinkled, and mouth turned into a startled frown.
No, not startled—caught off guard. How might he turn ‘caught off guard’ into an adjective, Techno wondered? Surprised didn’t have the right connotation. Flummoxed, perhaps? Bewildered?
Wilbur was saying something again, with his arms crossed and bare feet pattering impatiently against the glossed honeywood of their study floor.
Techno blinked and tried to refocus himself on the situation before him.
“Put what down?”
Wilbur glared at him like he was crazy.
Like the answer should be obvious, like Techno was a mortal-minded simpleton with no manners and even less common sense.
Techno got that look a lot.
It was familiar in a confusing way, because most of the time Techno didn’t even know what he’d done to deserve it. One might think he’d get used to the feeling, but it’s hard to get used to something you don’t even recognize until it’s done or explained—like nostalgia, or déjà vu. How does one prepare for the feeling of déjà vu? Isn’t the sensation, by definition, blossomed by its own unexpectedness?
Wilbur huffed and pinched the thin space between his eyes, sharpened and pale as the bridged bone beneath his skin. “The pen.”
Techno straightened. He looked to his hand, which had been idly twirling the gilded fountain pen in question between each of his fingers for the greater part of an hour while he wrestled with the contents of his still-empty parchment. “Why?”
“Because you’ve done nothing but toy around with it for the past…” Wilbur trailed off and made an extravagant show of checking the watch on his slender wrist, a glittering contraption of white gold as smooth as the black leather that bound it together. “Two and a half hours.”
“I’m thinking,” Techno murmured defensively, drawing the pen closer to his palm and closing his gold-ringed fingers around its body, warmed already by the natural heat of his skin and the nearby desk lamp’s amber glow.
Wilbur made a frustrated whining noise (this, too, was quite familiar to Techno now—albeit in an easier, more digestible way) and flopped down on the round scarlet chaise that sat across the room, low to the ground and dripping with tassels and trinkets that the twins took turns adoring and despising in equal measure. Ornate, gaudy, expensive, flamboyant, charming, atrocious, expensive, cheap—truly, they argued it all.
“Well think faster,” Wilbur said with a scowl. “I’m bored, and it’s finally springtime. We should go exploring.”
“Can’t,” Techno replied, turning back to his work. “I’m busy.”
Wilbur squawked and sat up on his elbows, rosy mouth pulled open in an incredulous gape that contorted his pointed nose and doe eyes into waxen caricatures of themselves. It always made Techno want to laugh when he saw his twin brother like this—a man blessed with unnaturally handsome features that lured even the devoutest nuns into his arms for capture, transformed into a hideous gargoyle when he had no façade to perform.
Besides laughter, Techno also felt a little flattered in these times, tingly warmth licking up his sternum, because he knew he was one of the few creatures in existence that Wilbur trusted enough to unleash his full range of emotional expressions.
“Busy?” Wilbur parroted in a nasally pitch that was probably supposed to be offensive, but instead it just came off as petty. “With what, another blank page?”
Techno again turned to the parchment on his lap, and on the table, and the pieces covering the floor. Novels and memoirs and sonnets of absolutely nothing.
He exhaled softly through his nose and shook his head.
“Yeah, I guess.”
The sneer on Wilbur’s mouth changed, dropping into something softer and careful and crafted just for him—his twin brother, his matching pair. “Is it—are you enjoying it? Am I interrupting something fun?”
Techno raised an eyebrow again, another bewilderment.
Caught off guard.
Curious.
Déjà vu.
“Not… especially?”
“Well…” Wilbur cleared his throat and the expression morphed again, lips curving up and eyes twinkling, the pointed tips of his ears pinkening with delight. It was his face for mischief, and it was oh so very familiar. “In that case, could it wait just a little while? Like I said, it’s spring.”
“Technically, it’s only the seventeenth,” Techno pointed out, nodding his head at the calendar pinned over the desk and set to the month of March. “Spring doesn’t officially start for a few more days.”
“Oh, whatever,” Wilbur groaned, his eyes turning downcast and disappointed, and Techno let him wallow in his self-pity for a few seconds before finally giving in. He snapped the empty book closed and set it on the desk, shuffled the surrounding cream-white papers into a bundle, and topped it all off with the pen he’d indeed held without any true purpose for two and a half hours.
“C’mon,” Techno sniffed. He stood and made his way over to Wilbur, nudged his brother with his toe, and extended a calloused hand. “I heard the clovers are turning the hillsides a beautiful green, we can probably admire them better now that the sky’s clear of rain.”
Wilbur’s cheeks glowed with a brilliant grin.
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Techno truly had no idea how he managed to get himself into these situations.
Well, no, that was an exaggeration.
He knew how, he just didn’t know why.
“Wil,” he crowed nervously, affixing the helmet he’d been given more firmly atop his head. “I’m startin’ to have a few doubts about this plan of yours!”
Wilbur’s shrill of laughter echoed up through the clear air between them, his devilish jig a distant wriggling spot on the lush grassy plains far below, long-limbed and quick as a dart with snapping coiled beasts cradled close to his chest and smearing multi colored paint streaks over the empty canvas of his translucent skin.
He looked like a spider in the corner of a room, elusive and providing Techno with an equal flicker of anxiety as when one such creature made its way into his field of vision.
“Don’t be such a coward, Technoblade!” Wilbur cackled, seemingly uncaring of the fanged serpents hissing and licking at his elf-tipped ears. “Just keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times!”
“I’d hardly call this rusty old potions cauldron a vehicle!” Techno cried back, an angry retort to the ‘coward’ comment on the tip of his tongue, but it was too late. Wilbur was already rigging his contraption up to the base of the tree upon which Techno was perched, the evil plot born from nothing less than a fever dream corroding the sense from Wilbur’s mind and replacing it with his favorite flavor of adrenaline—pulling pranks.
Techno only meant to satisfy Wilbur’s antsy boredom with a tranquil stroll through the shamrocks, but of course they happened to stumble upon a mortal dressed in pagan paraphernalia with a meagre crowd of followers trailing after him. The mortal was plucking up shamrocks and pointing to the heart-shaped leaves, prattling off a sermon about trinities and Gods that existed in the mortals’ minds at the time, and thus, the idea that became the how for Techno’s current predicament in the unruly form of Wilbur and his beautifully illogical mind.
“Ready… Set…!” Wilbur sang, and Techno scrunched his eyes shut and prayed for painless release. “Go!”
All at once, he was flying.
A static shock of fae energy surged through the trunk of the tree, catapulting Techno and all its slithering inhabitants through the air in a magnificent arc over the clearing, their course propelled beyond ordinary physical capabilities by Wilbur’s magic, and Techno was flying.
He managed to crack an eye open to look below, where he saw the priest and his followers gaping up at the magical parade, and a bubble of laughter burst unbidden from Techno’s throat at the sight.
Techno was sat in a blackmetal cauldron filled to the brim with blaze rods and gold (for Techno’s comfort, Wilbur explained delightedly when asked, and Techno couldn’t deny that it was at least a small relief to know that if he died, he’d die surrounded by his treasures), soaring through the spring air with a tail of snakes painted in all the colors Wilbur could scrounge up from their paint supply back home behind him, and frankly, Techno was having the time of his life.
“We’ll start a new legend,” Wilbur claimed with frantic glee, assembling the parts and dragging Techno behind him by the hand earlier that afternoon. “It’ll be like—after every spring rain, the sun will pour out a curse of magical snakes. It’s genius! We’ll never see a mortal outside after rain again! They’ll be too scared of the big scary pink-haired goblin and his flying army of snakes to interrupt our lovely little spring walks like that stupid priest. Oh, it’s brilliant, don’t you think so? That’s why I’m painting these little guys all these different colors, so they look magical and foreign.”
Techno did not follow the logic. But at least he knew how it happened, right?
When he at last landed on the other end of the clearing, he was met by the distant screams of the priest’s followers as the fled further away from his crash site, and it was a great weight off Techno’s shoulders to know that at least he wouldn’t need to waste any magic on curious mortals who dared approach him after that.
“Who art thou?”
Scratch that.
Techno sighed and turned to see none other than the shamrock priest himself, pale-faced and trembling before the fae man sitting in a cauldron amidst a plume of dust and mud and cream-pigmented serpents.
The priest narrowed his eyes at Techno, with his pointed ears and fae coloring, and his already blanched face went ashen grey. “Thou—thou art an elf! An evil elf!”
“Heh?” Techno snorted. He didn’t have time for this. He dusted off his tunic and gathered the fallen pieces of gold from the ground surrounding him, ignoring the mortal’s mounting panic in favor of resurrecting his wounded pride and treasures. “First of all, an evil elf is called a druid. And second, I’ve just unleashed a fuck ton of rainbow snakes on your land, so. Better take care of that. Leave me alone, forget you ever saw me, whatever.”
“The druids control the snakes,” the priest whispered to himself, nodding. “I see. Yes, I will drive them out. Lord Rainbow, dost thou desire anything else from me before I depart from thy holy presence?”
Techno shook his head and waved him off. “No. Depart, shoo, whatever. But don’t touch my gold.”
By the time Wilbur caught up to him, Techno had successfully collected the remainder of his treasures, and gathered enough energy in his palms to turn his brother’s hair a fiery reddish orange in retaliation for subjecting Techno to such abhorred social interaction.
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In the end, Wilbur got what he wanted.
A legend was crafted about them, although not in the same narrative as intended. Apparently, the story of multicolored fae snakes flying in an arc through the air had transformed into a vision of a rainbow, and if one followed it to the base, they would find a red-haired leprechaun fiercely guarding a black pot of gold amidst a field of clovers.
They never found out what became of the snakes, nor the mortal that swore to banish them.
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“What were you even working on that day, anyway?” Wilbur asked as the two were reminiscing about the failed plot before the fire one March evening a few years later.
Techno’s cheeks reddened. He thumbed at a packaged tome in his hands, which was bound in crisp black leather with white gold and silver accents, the incriminating title covered by the brown paper and red twine that sealed it from the light of day since he’d finished the thing a few months ago. He shoved it into his twin’s lap and looked away just as quickly, busying his hands with a loose thread on his tunic.
Wilbur’s eyes prickled over Techno’s profile with palpable scrutiny. Even without looking, Techno could feel the way his eyebrows raised—curious, startled, caught off guard—and the way his mouth opened and closed wordlessly for a few moments before he said, “What is it?”
“Open it,” Techno muttered. “It’s for you.”
Then followed the sounds of peeling paper, string falling away to reveal the book now filled with ink and half-empty pages, exactly as intended, and the silence after that was drowned by the bashful thrumming of Techno’s heart, pumping blood through his ears.
“Twin Fairytales,” Wilbur read aloud, reverent and soft as the way the pads of fingertips traced over the embossed letters. “It’s a book of… Myths? Like those Greek legends you collect?”
Techno looked up at last, met his twin’s gaze, and saw a familiar (always familiar) fondness reflecting back at him in the matching brown of Wilbur’s eyes. “Open it,” he prompted with a shrug, folding his arms tight against his buttoned-up chest.
Wilbur surprised him then, reaching out and splaying his palm over Techno’s bicep with a cheerful yet achingly tender laugh. “Don’t bunch your shoulders up like that, your neck will be sore in the morning from poor posture. And you don’t have to be so embarrassed, I quite like your stories.”
Techno didn’t bother asking how Wilbur knew he was feeling abashed.
He understood the how just as he understood the concerned furrow that appeared beneath Wilbur’s mop of brown curls whenever he saw that Techno was troubled by something, or the dewy wetness that decorated the pink of his waterline once Wilbur opened the cover and read the first page, or the sharp uptick of his breathing that signaled he was astounded and touched beyond verbal explanation when the true intention of Techno’s book registered in his head and in his heart.
It was different from the gasp he made when he was frightened because it rose in pitch near the end, tightened and squeezed at his heart rather than plummeting out in dread—and the grateful way Wilbur brought his hand up to his mouth in an opened hush was different from the way he did it when he was weary, the pattern of his breathy syllables stuttering an inverted rhythm that signaled when he was preparing to yawn or sneeze or speak.
Techno read his twin’s unspoken language in the same tempo that Wilbur read his own, spelled out in full on the pages. A trickling flood of nostalgia—of déjà vu—swept over Techno’s stomach and chest in that moment, remembrance for the day he first decided to embark on this project flatlining his sternum and dizzying the coherent syllables in his thoughts to a lovingly familiar mush.
Wilbur, the book read, Sometimes I feel like you and I are completely different people. And that’s probably because we are—you’re Wilbur, and I’m Technoblade. But we’re still twins, and that’s got to count for something, right?
Our similarities begin and end in exactly the same places as our differences. That’s what makes us so great, I think. We embark on this journey of life together, and there’s no one I’d rather share millenia with than you. I can’t imagine telling a single story of mine without the polarity of you, your perspective and unique melodrama filling in the gaps between mine.
Here I’ve compiled a series of anecdotes all about our lives, and I want you to fill in whatever you think I’ve missed. Each written page is separated by a blank, so whoever reads it can know that our fairytales are never complete without the both of us.
Happy St. Patrick’s day, you obnoxious bastard. When we’re finished with this book, you’re helping me write a new legend to obliterate my mortal reputation as a leprechaun for good, alright?
- Your favorite twin Technoblade.
Wilbur wiped his eyes and sniffled, shook his head in the way that meant he was trying to distract from the fact that he couldn’t speak without his voice breaking, and Technoblade let out a soft chuff of laughter.
“I think I’ll start by introducing our chaise with a bit more flattery,” Wilbur giggled in a crackly whisper, retrieving a pen from the mantle and gesturing to the tassels on the rounded chair with a smirk. “I know last week I said it was awful, but I quite like all the little mismatched baubles and things. It’s kinda…”
“Charming?” Techno filled in, teasing. “I already said that. You’ll have to pick a better adjective—which, believe me, is harder than it looks.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Wilbur snickered.
He plopped down on the cushion beside his twin and set to work scribbling out a tale of cauldrons and snakes writhing through clovers, and Techno merely shook his head and tilted his head back to listen, warmed by the light of the fire and the familiar lilting voice of his twin—his matching pair, his nostalgia, his déjà vu.
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