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His brother reads him stories as a child. Stories of wrongs made right and good beating evil. The hero is righteous, brave and pure. The hero saves the day. The hero gets the girl.
His brother becomes everything he was ever supposed to be. He saves the day. He gets the girl only to lose her and then himself.
He becomes some of those things. Eventually. He gets the girl. Sometimes. It’s complicated. Until one day, her laughter fades into a stunned realisation, and it isn’t so complicated anymore.
And then he loses himself.
He wants to be the hero but he is just so much better as the villain. The plots and schemes. The outfits and the alter ego. He thrives and it feels so right until, one day, it doesn’t. Until her laughter fades and he can’t look her in the eye anymore.
She forces him to. Her light blinds him and he wants nothing more than to look away if she would just let him.
He always blinks first. Maybe that is when she transforms and shifts; in the milliseconds in which he couldn’t meet her eye.
It’s in the ruins, when all the light and pretence are gone, that he sees her clearly and she sees him. Probably for the first time. Definitely for the last.
The hero wins. The hero gets the girl.
The villain loses. The villain seeps back into the darkness.
The girl was never a prize. The girl was in her own story all along.
Sometimes the hero is the villain and the girl and every role in between. His brother, with his immaculately maintained books, with their crisp lines of black and white, never told him about this.
Give me a better ending he pleads silently.
“Maybe if you play your cards right,” she replies brokenly.
The chapter ends. The book closes. It is returned to the dusty shelf where its lessons will soon be forgotten.