Work Text:
He was alone again for the afternoon. Parents at work and both brothers at their respective after school activities, Bård had the house to himself. After dropping his jacket and backpack by the door to his room he wandered aimlessly around the house, until his feet led him into Vegard's room. He stared around at the small pile of books stacked by his haphazardly made bed, the built models of various aircrafts displayed on the shelves, and the boxes their parts came in discarded in the corner, all of his boring, dorky shit. On his desk were binders full of notes, some for classes, others for past and current plays he was working on in the school's theater group. One binder was with him right now, Bård knew, at rehearsals.
He missed his big brother. He was incredibly proud of him and everything he did on stage, but he himself could only join the next year and between separate classes and Vegard's rehearsals, there just wasn't as much time to spend together as he was used to. At first he enjoyed the time apart. Vegard was definitely a lot to deal with sometimes, what with all his annoying habits, but the weeks went by and a strange little loneliness which almost no one else could fill began to take hold. Maria was the only one whose company could really distract him from it, but even she wasn't available every day. Bård opened his brother's closet and peered inside. It was a lot more organized than his own, but still not actually up to their mother's standards. He dug around through his shirts and sweaters until he found the hoodie he liked and slipped it on as he wandered back out of the room. It was only a couple of days later when Vegard seemed to realize that it was gone.
Bård was sitting in his own room one evening, weaving a bracelet to give to Maria later, when he was suddenly yanked up from his bed by the hood of his jacket. Vegard violently tugged at the garment, pulling and pushing him around like a helpless ragdoll until it was finally off and then giving him one final shove, knocking him back onto the mattress.
"Stop! Stealing! My stuff!!"
Vegard shouted down at him, shaking the hoodie in his fist at him for emphasis, and stormed out of the room, leaving a dumbstruck younger brother behind him. Confusion and embarrassment made his eyes sting until finally squeezing out reluctant tears past his nearly shut eyelids. Ever since Vegard had found friends and made himself busy in his theater group, it was as if Bård was nothing but a useless parasite to him. Even when he was home he almost never wanted to do anything with him. His saddened mind wandered back to childhood memories, times when he and Vegard spent practically every waking moment together, playing, learning, chores, anything really. Vegard used to care about him, worry about him when he got hurt and ask him questions and share things with him. He used to be his friend, now it seemed as though the only thing they had in common was the roof over their heads.
One particular day crept into mind, one he hadn't thought of in a very long time. A day unlike any other they had had before or since, a day in which he learned what was in store for him and his brother. These days it seemed quite unbelievable that they would ever reach that point, working together, performing together. He barely remembered most of the details of that strange day in which they travelled 17 years into their own future and met themselves as they would be in their 30's. But he remembered Vegard. He remembered watching him on stage, he was like a real rock star, so much more than the skinny long haired bastard wobbling around on stage, confusing his lines and trying to charm the girls in his group with his singing. THAT Vegard was cool. And he was nice to him. A friendly little memory of the man's big cheeky smile and a red painted finger playfully heading towards Bård's 9 year old nose, curled up in the pit of his stomach and radiated the warmth he felt from him back then.
---
It took him about an hour on a bike to find the overgrown backyard on the way between his old elementary school and their previous home in Bergen. He left his bike by the entrance to the old, crumbling building, the overgrowth from years of neglect making it impossible for the wheels to go any further. Every crunch of his shoes on the long dead foliage rang loud in the silence surrounding him. It appeared that no one had come this way in a very long time, perhaps even not since he and Vegard had come from there so many years ago.
Even covered by the gnarly climbing trees and their leaves, the rusty red of the old water closet-like structure stuck out like a sore thumb in its green and brown surroundings. The branches twisted eerily around it, making it look as uninviting as it probably should have been. Still, Bård crept nearer, circling it with careful steps until he found its entrance. He placed a hesitant hand on the handle and tugged, but the plants held it firmly shut. He tugged again and managed to open it just an inch before it snapped back again. The resistance only fueled his resolve, however, and soon he was pulling at branches and yanking at the door with all his might. Finally, the trees relented and the door swung open, catching him unprepared and making him fly back to land on his backside with a loud crunch. Winded, he remained on the ground a minute to catch his breath and brush the muddy leaves from his hands. When he looked up at the time machine it stood wide open, the rod with the four handles standing at the ready inside.
Maybe this wasn't a good idea.
He stared at the hourglass in the center of the structure. It called to him, to give it a spin and have another adventure. To find another Vegard, one that liked him and could encourage him about the future they had together which seemed so unbelievable at the time. He knew Vegard wouldn't approve of this. But suddenly that thought filled him with defiant resolve, propelling him up from the ground and into the structure. It was when he placed his hand on one of the handles that he realized he didn't know how to control how far ahead he would go. And how far ahead did he even want to go? He supposed that since he didn't know, it didn't actually matter. He swung his arm and hit the hourglass with the edge of his hand, nearly missing it entirely. It didn't spin as fast as he remembered, but the lurching feeling in his stomach came all the same, giving him a sharp and alarming sensation of plummeting down an elevator chute.
It was a bad day. They were done with rehearsals at last and Bård knew his brother well enough to keep away from him until close to showtime. It didn't happen often, but there was always a certain low point in a show tour in which tempers were uncharacteristically short, due to the fact that they'd spent way too much time together without break, even sharing the same hotel rooms to cut expenses. There were no hard feelings about it, and they knew that it would pass for both of them, and that it would never affect their performance.
Bård wandered around through streets nearby the Chat Noir theater in Oslo, where they were performing that night. Vegard was somewhere else, probably still backstage or at the hotel, so he planned to steer clear of both. He browsed the display windows by which he passed at a leisurely pace. He stopped at an appliance store and examined a food processor standing attractively on top of its own box. Those things never work properly but his wife insisted on having one and he couldn't remember whether or not the one that they had had already broken yet or not. He was always battling kitchen gadgets, as if they had to work against their will, he honestly didn’t understand why they didn’t just stick to the old school appliances, the ones that don’t require electricity and buttons and things that can go wrong every single time, riding every single one of your last nerves as you’re trying not to be late delivering your children to school yet again. He would have to write a sketch about this phenomenon one day, he thought to himself.
He decided not to buy the food processor, just remember the shop for future reference, and started heading back towards the theater, carrying with him a strange sadness he couldn't quite place . As he approached the main entrance, he spotted a skinny teenage boy staring at their Ylvis III poster propped up on a stand outside the double doors. A knot twisted in the pit of his stomach, deja vu creeping up his spine, giving him the sense that he knew this boy. He slowed to a stop a couple of meters away from him, eventually catching his attention. They stared at each other, both afraid to speak and not knowing what to say.
"No, you're kidding me now..."
Vegard's voice turned both their heads away from each other. Together all three of them formed an invisible triangle on the sidewalk.
“Vegard, I..” The boy started.
“What are you doing here?!” Vegard cut him off, intimidating both of them with the anger in his tone.
“Who is this?” Bård asked, nodding at the boy.
“It’s you, Bård. You as a teen.. you travelled through t- why the fuck are you here, Bård?” He looked so upset, he was barely making sense. Bård had no idea what he was talking about. Travelled through what? Time? But that’s ridiculous.
The boy said nothing, but the anguish on his face was apparent.
“Where’s Vegard? Is he even with you? I don’t remember this.” Vegard kept shooting questions at the youngster, barely even giving him time to answer.
“He didn’t come with me.”
“Of course not.”
“Please, I’m sorry, I.. I just needed to see you, talk to you.” Bård pleaded, and Bård looked from one to the other, noting the hard expression Vegard wore. He was even more agitated now than when he last saw him that morning.
“How about I take care of this..?” Bård took a step forward, bringing all attention to him. Vegard considered him for a moment, but then checked his watch and looked back at the boy.
“Bård, where's the time machine?”
“It’s right around the corner, like it knew I needed to find you!”
“Yeah, uh huh. Lead the way, please, we’re getting you back home right now.”
“Why do you hate me so much?!” Bård suddenly blurted out, too loud for comfort, and attracted the attention of passers by. Vegard was barely even taken aback by what he said, he just sighed and rolled his head back in exasperation.
“I don’t hate you, Bård, I just don’t have time for this now, we have to go in and get ready for a show. Even Bård knows that..” he gestured at his age matching brother opposite him.
“Is this what life is going to be like?” Bård suddenly turned to his older self, addressing him for the first time, “Am I that pathetic, that I follow Vegard around my whole life no matter what he says or does to me? I don’t understand! Why are we working together if we hate each other?!”
“Okay, alright. Calm down..” Bård said, raising his hands before him. He took a few steps closer to his brother and spoke softly so only he could hear, “Vegard, I don’t know what's going on here, but I don't think we can let him go like this.. Can't we just take him backstage with us and deal with it after the show?"
He could practically hear the wheels turning in Vegard's head. He very much didn't want to comply with Bård's idea, but looking at the teenager on the verge of tears in front of him, he knew he was right. "Mkay.." He muttered finally and turned back to the boy.
"You'll wait backstage until after the show and then we'll talk. But first, we need to find a way to take the time machine with us. Is it that way?"
Bård jumped to action, somehow encouraged by being allowed to stay with them a bit longer, and nodded as he began to hurry around the building into a back alley, the two men hot on his heels.
---
Bård sat alone in their dressing room, gripping the center rod of the time machine tight in his hands. When they found it in the back alley behind the theater, Vegard found a way to detach it from the whole structure so that only the essential part could just be carried around. He stared at the small monitor on the make up table, displaying the stage. This was different than what he remembered. They were both dressed completely in black, almost uniformed. The outfits looked meaningless, like blank slates to serve any kind of scenario they would perform. It started with another weird intro, this time shadow theater and a voice-over narration.
"25 years ago, In the distant city of Bergen…”
It wasn't a concert at all. It was a kind of play, like a review show with different sketches and bits one after the other, though they still did have a music band on stage most of the time. He watched himself standing confidently alone on stage, warming up the audience and spouting nonsense. It was nothing really profound, and Bård found himself beginning to wonder when Vegard would be coming back. Eventually he did and they began a sketch around that famous Peer Gynt monologue. Bård laughed with himself and thoroughly enjoyed their dynamic on stage. It did kind of remind him of arguments they used to have when they would try to plan things together. What really struck him, though, was how equal they looked. The natural dominance he usually felt from Vegard seemed to have evaporated, and the distance between them seemed non existent.
After his Peer Gynt performance, Vegard disappeared. Bård expected him to reappear on stage any minute or show up to check on him in the room he was locked in, but a full 6 minutes went by without any trace of him. When he reappeared in the next sketch, skating across the stage with an old broom in his hand, a turban on his head and a giant grin on his face, Bård was relieved, but also disappointed. Couldn’t he have come to see him if he had so much time between scenes? He answered himself, thinking of how much time Vegard back home spends on the plays he works on, how much more he does other than change costumes and perform lines, and reasoned that perhaps he was just too busy, as usual. Just when he was getting back into the show, trying to understand what the sketch on roller blades was all about, his own older self stepped into the room.
“How are you doing?” He asked, closing the door behind him. He looked in a bit of a hurry. Bård saw Vegard on the monitor walk onto the stage, back in nothing but his black uniform again and talking to the crowd.
“I’m okay. Will Vegard be here soon?”
“Um, probably not until the end of the show. Listen, I’ve only got a minute before I have to be back up again, but I wanted to tell you something.”
Bård listened, though he couldn’t help glancing every once and a while at the screen.
“I’m only picking up bits and pieces, but I do remember a thing or two from when I was, well.. you, I guess. I imagine you’re here because now’s about the time when Vegard was being a complete asshole of a big brother, am I right?”
The boy nodded, casting his eyes to the ground.
“Okay, so I want you to pay attention to the sketch after this one. There’s going to be a short Spiderman thing that’ll lead up to a sketch I mostly wrote myself. Vegard knows that it’s something of an exaggeration of one specific argument we had a while ago, but what he doesn’t know is that it’s actually also based on how you’re feeling now. A lot of the words are actually some really fucking pretentious shit I wrote in high sch- ehm.. what’s even more fun is that I mixed up the roles so he wouldn’t be able to tell, so just… watch it. I think it’ll help.”
“Uh.. okay.” Bård was confused, but Bård already had the door open to leave. His time was running out. But just before he closed it back after him he reappeared.
“How good is the sound on that thing?”
“Not very..”
“Come with me. Stay close and don’t you dare tell Vegard about this.”
Somehow Bård had managed to stuff his younger self behind a pile of equipment in a dark corner behind the scenes in stage left. He could see the stage quite clearly from a crease between a black chair and some unused speakers. By some miracle no one had noticed Bård walking with a black bundle of cloth under his arm up to the immediate backstage area. He was to keep the tarp over his head the whole time he was there, and wait for him to give him the okay to sneak back to the room. Sure enough, the dialogue was much clearer from where he was, as was the stage itself, not being filtered through the crappy monitor. Still, he barely understood what they were going on about until Bård started introducing the Spiderman act he had told him was coming. Vegard seemed reluctant, wanting to keep going with the boring informational one, but in the end Bård won and they put on their masks. But Vegard wouldn’t cooperate, which younger Bård in the sidelines thought to be typical of him. He always thought Bård’s ideas were stupid these days. As he watched himself trying to convince Vegard to go along with the song, he was getting rather annoyed with how uncooperative he was being. And in front of an audience! The end of it was that Vegard just walked right off the opposite end of the stage and Bård had to run out after him. He couldn’t believe his eyes. That seemed completely unprofessional, just giving up on a sketch they’d probably agreed on beforehand and fucking off in the middle, leaving him to deal with it on his own. But then he was back. He had with him a chair and he sat down, right in the middle of the stage looking so dejected, Bård didn’t quite know what to think anymore.
“Vegard!” He came running onto the stage after him, until he noticed him up front.
“You’re sitting here now, we.. You can’t just run away like that, we were right in the middle of the Spiderman song! ...Is something wrong?”
“No.” Vegard responded immediately, but even Bård in the sidelines wasn’t buying that. He stared at them wide eyed, mouth open, completely forgetting they were on a stage and doing an act, not actually having a real confrontation right there in front of everybody.
“But I can see something’s wrong.” Bård spoke his own thoughts.
“It’s nothing.”
“Tell me then! We.. we have to be able to talk about these things.”
Bård was reminded of times back when Vegard still cared, when something was bothering him and he would badger him until he would finally break and tell him what was wrong. Now he’d be lucky if Vegard even noticed him bleeding from a physical injury.
“Is there something I’ve done wrong, or..?”
“I don’t want to talk about it!”
“But what is it then? We’ve got to.. Are you jealous of my looks or..?”
The rumble of laughter from the crowd brought Bård to the embarrassing remembrance that this was a show. Neither one of them was actually upset, no matter how convincing it looked. It was all a big joke. Vegard side-glanced at him but didn’t answer, so he prodded on.
“Come on, tell me!”
“I just think that Spiderman song, it just comes so suddenly and unmotivated in the middle of the lecture..”
Bård wouldn’t have been able to deny his disappointment at that moment. How shallow the issue was in contrast with how serious they appeared, though the audience seemed to enjoy it. Still, he had to admire how much better at acting Vegard seemed to have gotten over the years. Without noticing, both Bårds made the same dismissive movement with their heads as Vegard explained himself.
“But we were so into it! We were going to start with building regulations and..”
“We can sing another song! We can sing the Batman song or..”
“That’s not what it’s about!”
“What’s it about then?!”
“...Building regulations.”
As the dialogue continued Bård came to a realization that if one replaced the nonsensical jibber jabber about Superhero songs and building regulations, one would have almost word for word any number of arguments they had had in the past. From having to convince one another to confide whatever issues they had, right down the words Bård had never even dared to say about how he felt he didn’t know Vegard anymore, that he seemed to think he was too good for him now. Sure, there were jokes strewn into the whole thing to keep it entertaining, and probably to throw Vegard off realizing what this was really about, but as the one who was destined to write this sketch one day, it was crystal clear to him.
“Answer me!”
The musicians played through the silence following his outburst, until it turned into a song.
“I can see that you’re struggling,
Know that you have it tough.
Everything we had together is gone.
You shine on the stage,
But when the curtain has fallen,
The mask falls from your face, and your soul is sinking…
What can I give you?
What can I say to you?
Open the door, and let me come inside.
So much fun
We had together here on stage!
Where did it go?
I’m calling for you… Give me an answer.”
He couldn’t believe his ears. He had written those words almost precisely only a week ago back home one night. That wasn’t exactly the melody he had had in mind, it was much better in fact, some of the words and the pace of the verses were changed, but it was unmistakably his own song. But he had never ever intended to let Vegard, or anyone else for that matter, anywhere near it. He felt so embarrassed, heat was rising to his face as he watched himself on stage. He’d have felt completely betrayed, had he not remembered that it was only himself who chose to reveal it. How could he be singing it live in front of an audience and in front of his own brother, to whom he wrote the song? Did no one really ever confront him about the meaning behind it?
He tried to watch both of them at the same time. Exaggerated movements... an expression on Vegard’s face at one point during the chorus had him looking like he realized everything for a minute, before it turned into a silly cabaret move. It was all so expertly done. Such an intricate mixture of serious and joke, one could be kept guessing all night.
The second verse was his too, but now Vegard got up to sing it.
“He can’t see the forest,
for all the green trees.
The price of loneliness becomes flask of life.
I walk across the creek,
But don’t bring back any fucking water!
Everyone has cast stones at the glass house at some point...”
Hearing him sing those words, clearly not at all realizing what they meant and just thinking of them as silly metaphors made up for a laugh, was very unsettling to Bård, but also cathartic in a way. He forced himself to pretend that Vegard knew, on some level, that he was singing about himself, being blind to what’s in front of him, creating a rift of loneliness between them. He had to know. After all, they’d solved it somehow. They were friends again and working together, just as they always knew they would. Vegard had to have realized at some point how wrong he was in how he was treating him, and set it right. Did they talk about it? Or did they just go back to the way they were? Though it didn’t seem that way. They had evolved. They were more in sync now than they had ever been as kids. As the silly song came to its climax, Bård felt his emotions quiet. He found that he’d managed to calm himself in all that had to do with Vegard just through watching them perform this together, and knew that when the time came, he wouldn’t hesitate to bring up this song for the purpose of doing a pretentious musical act. It was perfect, and it was just what he needed.
He was startled when Vegard suddenly ran back to his side of the stage, pretending to be crying a while after being hidden from the crowd’s view, until he stood right in front of him so Bård could witness the transformation on his face from an exaggerated unhappy grimace to a look of exhausted relief as a stage worker handed him a plastic cup of water to drink. He observed him while he took a moment to himself, staring into the darkness above young Bård’s head blankly, perhaps listening to Bård’s monologue on stage.
How he feared him in that moment. He feared being discovered in that dark corner, not where he was supposed to be, but he also felt the fear which came with ever being in awe with the one who was Vegard. The man who can sing, the big brother with the nasty temper, the authority figure among siblings. He couldn’t help it. It didn’t matter what was going on between them or even which one of his Vegards he was looking at, he would forever be the older brother he admired and looked up to. Despite himself he had to fight a terrible urge to run up and hug him. He wanted a hug from him more than he could possibly say.
"Hello, is there anyone out there at all?!"
Bård shouting out at the audience seemed to be Vegard’s cue to get a move on. He placed the cup on the nearest surface and made a light dash around the corner behind the stage, presumably to get to the other side of it.
He’d seen enough. He knew he’d gotten what he came for, or the best of it he could have hoped for anyway, and he felt that he wanted to leave some mystery for himself, when the time came to actually write this show. Nothing Vegard could say or do later after the show would probably make him feel any more at peace with his own situation than he already was after watching Ka Kan Eg Gi Deg. Bård took hold of the time-rod and, with one last glance at himself on stage, he spun the hourglass. He just managed to catch Vegard coming on to join him when the world disappeared into blackness.