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“What was Benzaiten like?” Nureyev asks, one night under the cloak of darkness, where old wounds and secrets are safe to whisper aloud. They've been talking all night, and after the third passing mention of Juno's twin, Peter finally cracks.
“He was…my brother,” Juno says, by way of non-explanation.
Peter Nureyev never had any siblings—not that he knows of, anyway. But Peter has a past, and he knows the soul-withering ache of never getting to talk about someone you’ve lost.
The waiting works. Juno takes a breath.
“He was cool, and funny, and smart, and he was everyone's favorite. It was infuriating. Can you imagine having an identical twin who everyone likes better and thinks is more attractive?”
Nureyev snickers quietly in the dark. “Come, come now, Juno, I can’t believe that.“
“Oh really? He won ‘Galaxy’s Best Smile’ in third grade. How is that even possible! We had the same smile!”
Nureyev laughs in earnest now, Juno’s ire so endearing that he wants to wrap Juno up in his arms and bury his face in Juno’s curls. He settles for wrapping a loose arm around Juno’s waist and tipping his head against Juno's shoulder.
“All right, so he was the favorite, and a gaggle of eight-year-olds thought he had a good smile. What else?”
Juno softens beneath his voice and his touch, and the next words Juno speaks are warm.
“He was an incredible dancer. You’ve never seen anyone dance like him. A few months before he died, he had a recital. We were fighting all the time back then, so I almost didn’t go. I was still in the academy, and…Sasha and I were in the middle of a really competitive streak to see who could break up the most bar fights or something equally stupid, I don't remember, so I was staying late every night to do paperwork. But there was this one case that was driving me crazy, because I realized the gal we brought in had given me a fake name and I was trying to track down her real one. This was before Rita so what would probably take her thirty seconds was taking me hours. You know how I am with tech. I had a splitting headache when I looked at the clock and saw that the show was supposed to be starting in seven minutes. I remember thinking so clearly, You’re going to regret not going.”
Juno takes a heavy breath.
“So I got in my car, and traffic was obviously horrible, because it always is, and I got there twenty minutes late but I walked in just as Benten’s performance was starting and it was…magical.” Juno’s voice is like a shrug, the kind you give when words can only do so much to capture the big, nebulous experience of a truth.
“Mom wasn’t really having any good days at that point, but she was having some okay days, and that night we picked her up and went out for burgers and fries. I had some money saved up already. Not a lot, but more than they had, enough to afford to get the good burgers, anyway. I know the night ended in me and mom fighting and Benzaiten taking her home early but…mostly I remember that it was a pretty good night.”
"It sounds like a really wonderful night," Peter says softly.
"Yeah, it was." Juno pauses, but it's clear he isn't finished talking. “The last message he left on my comms was this long, rambling one—he used to do that sometimes, when I hadn’t been home in a while or when we'd been distant after a fight. I think he knew that I would never delete a message from him and had to listen all the way through, and inevitably he would ramble for so long about so much nonsensical stuff that it would soften me. He was so optimistic. I swear it was like he got all the positivity and I was left with...this.
"So this last message was about his job and the recital and how mom was and how his students were. And then he went on for like two minutes about this curry he was learning how to make. Real curry, like the kind they had on Earth. Listed every ingredient—I still have no idea where he was getting the money for all those spices—and told me about how he’d let it simmer for five hours and taste it as he went. I remember thinking how ridiculous, five hours just to make food. Who had that kinda time?” Juno shifts away, and Nureyev lets him go. “At the very end of the message he said, ‘Bye, Juno. Love you so much, always. Remember to taste your food while it cooks!’”
“Your tattoo,” Peter whispers.
“My tattoo.” He can hear the smile in Juno’s voice.
Juno has a blue dragon tattoo winding across the left side of his ribcage. Arched in line with it are the words, “remember to taste your food while it cooks.” Peter had asked about it once, and Juno had brushed him off, saying it was a stupid tattoo he’d gotten as a teenager. He'd believed him then, because Juno had a lot of stupid tattoos—sewer rabbits and nonsensical poems his friend Mick had written that Juno had gotten tattooed on when he lost a bet, and a duck with a vegetable for a head—but Nureyev should've known better. The dragon on his ribcage is more delicate than the rest.
“I got it a few months after he died," Juno says while Nureyev fingers the raised skin of the tattoo in the dark. "I listened to that message obsessively, and at my next tattoo appointment I started crying in the chair before we started. I don't know why I did it, but the lady tattooing me was this surprisingly sweet older dame with long white hair and a braided beard, and she asked how I was and I just. Broke. before I knew what was happening I was telling her about Benzaiten and, well. Instead of the tattoo I was supposed to be getting, she started working on this."
“Ben would’ve pretended to hate that I tattooed this quote out of everything he ever said, which is how I know I made the right call.”
“One last way to annoy your brother?”
“Yup.”
“I used to try not to let myself think about him,” Juno says, head twisted back toward the ceiling, as if these words are too hard to say to someone’s face even in the pitch dark. “It never worked. The more I tried to push him out, the more I thought about him. For years, everything I did, I thought about what Benzaiten would say or do.
“But then…I got older, and it got harder to think about what Benten would think. Because Benzaiten is…” Juno clears his throat. “Can you imagine if the most important person in your life was frozen in time at nineteen?”
Peter’s blood runs to ice in his veins. He has never had to imagine anything less.
This is the closest Nureyev has ever come to telling Juno everything. About Slip and Saraswati and the men who manipulated him into unfathomable debt and how he has been running and hiding and fighting to stay alive and the way he has never felt a single moment of peace since.
At least, not until his dear detective.
But he doesn’t tell Juno, because how could he lay that burden on someone who never asked to carry it?
“Sorry,” Juno says heavily, mistaking Nureyev’s silence for discomfort of a different kind. “I didn’t mean to dump all that on you. I uh…I don’t talk about Benten a lot.”
Tucking his own past down as far as it will go for the moment, he pulls Juno back toward him. He kisses Juno’s head.
“Not at all, Juno. Thank you for telling me.”