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Nigredo had been the furthest from a conversationalist, for a long while at that. However, on the sparse occasions that he found someone to share a few words with, the topic of family was easily the one he avoided most. Not for a lack of it, of course ; if anything, one could say his family was larger than that of his average peer from school. Where was the aching wound of the matter hidden then? Everywhere, quite plainly. To properly describe it in words to anyone willing to listen would have been largely futile and thus, for anyone concerned, Nigredo and his family were people tied only by their last name.
Why was that, exactly?
He could never quite put a good name to what his relationship with Albedo was. Should one consider bonds formed of their own volition above those written in shared blood, Nigredo and him were closer to being strangers that simply happened to be brought up by their shared mother’s hand. Perhaps, there was a time where the two of them sought out each other's company, neither of which could recall. Each day they would sit at the very same table, then go to the very same school on the same bus and then pass one another in the hallway, never quite sharing more than a sentence worth of information - as if they stood on opposing sides of an invisible wall.
Not that the invisible wall could stop Nigredo from subtly observing Albedo from afar.
To his observations, it wasn’t just Nigredo he kept at arm’s reach. Teachers, classmates, members of the few clubs he joined, even people he referred to as friends - all standing in line behind a long tape of amicability, hand held in hand through a tissue and glove. Almost like a celebrity in a perpetual meet and greet, which was somewhat close to truth. Teachers were delighted to give him good grades in just about every subject conceivable, peers found him pleasant to be around. Gladly, as most people would have, he accepted all of their praises with humbleness. Yet, Nigredo scarcely ever heard Albedo expressing his genuine enjoyment towards anything. Anything anyone did was fine or great, at best. One time, he caught a glimpse of someone sharing their art with Albedo - while Nigredo was the furthest thing from an art critic, in his eyes the art in question was breathtaking. What did Albedo say to that? His answer bore no true weight and thus it was quickly carried off by the wind, away from Nigredo’s memory. Out of curiosity, later that day, Nigredo returned to the art class to look at the works displayed. It took some time as the class was on the second floor and he was morbidly allergic to stairs and doors (that and the classroom itself had been closed for the rest of the day), but when he arrived he saw that Albedo’s works were largely a majority of the drawings displayed.
Each one was a different kind of hyperrealistic portrait. One could have as well taken a photo and edited it to be in grayscale - or better yet, make a xerox of a photograph. Nigredo became increasingly confused. For years now he heard of what an incredible artist his brother was, how he kept bringing only good grades from art classes. Was this really it?
When he later returned home, it turned out that, yes, this was it. On Albedo’s desk lay open sketchbooks with colored pencils strewn around, each page filled with 1:1 copies of existing paintings, important people or existing places. Nothing else. He even got as low as to search through the more hidden sketchbooks for a semblance of anything remotely interesting, inevitably leaving the room empty handed, but the matter still lingered. Did he actually think it was art? Could he actually draw outside of the practiced hyperrealism? Or did he simply like the attention?
Whichever the case was, Nigredo remembered exactly why there was no true bond with them, so to speak : Albedo simply didn’t care for it and neither did Nigredo, though for vastly different reasons entirely.
Oh well, he remembered thinking to himself. He wasn't losing much.
To say he didn’t have complications of the similar nature with his older brother, Durin, would have been a bold faced lie. It likely wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to say their last proper conversation occurred when Nigredo was trying to run head first into cars driving by their home, while Albedo was still waddling around in diapers, eating crayons. Which - if Nigredo thought about it - would certainly explain why his older brother seemed to have perpetually dark circles under his eyes for most of his life ; granted that, conveniently, Mother was never around enough to prevent her two youngest sons from meeting their ends at the hands of their arch-nemeses : pick-up trucks and food poisoning. Nigredo realized that he found himself speaking with Durin far more often than with Albedo in spite of the age-gap between them. However, it would be an insult to call them genuine talks.
“Durin, can you check the fridge for milk?”
“Durin, what are we having for dinner?”
“Durin, do you know where The Dog is? I haven’t seen it for the last five minutes and I'm scared.”
“Durin, could you make some tea?”
He never thought too much about the nature of those brief exchanges. After all, for as long as he could remember Durin was always around, going to school only on the weekends, never leaving for work of his own as he didn’t have a job to begin with. Without fail he was the first person in the house to wake up in order to help Mother get ready for work and the last to go to sleep only after all the chores for the day were done. Whenever Nigredo would go downstairs - granted that he even was in the house to begin with - Durin would likely be tending to some part of the house or helping out a family member, be it something as simple as helping Klee do her hair or something more taxing, like segregating files for Mother. Another thing of note, that seemingly escaped his mind whenever he didn’t actively think of it, was that Durin also had no people to call friends, nor activities to consider hobbies, his world beginning within the walls of their home and ending wherever Mother’s work would take him.
One particular day stuck to him for a while. It was a weekend, the weather no longer favoring his wanderings as the sky was swallowed whole by heavy dark clouds that heralded an inevitable rain, the air was cold and stagnant. With the outside inhospitable and the inside of his room facilitating no real entertainment besides books he read ten times over, he wandered downstairs. Klee was at a friend’s house for the rest of the day, Albedo was out doing…Something, while Alice and Mother were both holding lectures for universities on the mainland, leaving only Durin and Nigredo in the house.
Upon descending, Nigredo found Durin running from room to room with a mop, air heavy with the scent of cleaning products and air fresheners, so as to not disrespect his brother’s work he remained on one of the stairs, waiting for to notice him. Fortunately for him, Durin long since was trained to feel the expectant gazes of people from across the walls and thus his cleaning frenzy at last came to a halt when he peeked out of the kitchen, face red and glistening with sweat.
“Oh, hey! I completely forgot that you were still in the house!” he greeted him, almost blissfully unaware of the rather harsh underside of his words. “Do you need anything?”
“Kinda. Would you like to do…Anything fun, I guess?”
“...Like what?” Durin asked, a little dumbfounded.
“I ‘unno. I thought you’d think of something,” Nigredo shrugged. “What do you even do when you’re bored?”
“Oh, I’m never bored, really. There’s always something to do in the house, you know? Laundry, dishes, taking out the trash..”
“Yeah, but…What do you do when all of those things are already done and you have some free time?”
His words seemed to have tugged at an invisible light-switch to the lamp behind Durin’s eyes, as soon as the question reached his ears and registered in his brain, his expression went blank, drained of all color. Not that there was much color there to begin with, his skin always bordering on sickly grayness. Gears under his skull turned and turned, steam began pouring from his ears, his train of thought halting entirely as its crew and conductor alike searched for an answer, every pair of hands coming up empty.
“...I…Play music on the calculator while I’m calculating mom’s budget?” was the best he could come up with to Nigredo’s disappointment. “No, no, trust me, it is really fun. Oh hey, I have an idea! Why don’t you help me make supper for everyone?”
So he did, since he didn’t have anything to do, and the whole time the kitchen was filled with silence, should one not count the sound of the utensils and the like. It was around then that Nigredo realized that Durin was less of an older brother but a nanny and housekeeper all in one, and…Not much more, apparently. As if his life’s mission was to serve the house and family : nothing more, nothing less. Similarly enough, Nigredo felt less like a younger brother and more like another person that Durin tended to. When they were finally done, Durin immediately went to wash the dishes, already forgetting all about Nigredo who stood in the doorframe, observing him from afar before inevitably returning upstairs.
Klee was…Odd.
Not as a child, no. One could even go as far and say that she was the standard of what six year old girls should be : happy, practically bouncing with energy, bringing merriment wherever she went. It was impossible to feel not even a sliver of sympathy towards her, and the same applied to Nigredo. Objectively speaking, she was a lovely girl. Rather, she was odd as a family member : Alice brought her into the house as soon as she divorced her previous partner and married Mother, barely one year old at the time, still drooling everywhere and babbling. The day Alice first placed her carrier down inside their home was one Nigredo remembered very clearly. Durin and Albedo seemingly accepted her as their own little sister almost immediately, though in vastly different ways. The former cared for her as he once cared for his younger brothers, and the latter came up with the incredible idea of seeing whether the little babe preferred the flavor of crayons or oil pastels as soon as Alice and Mother were both out of sight for more than five seconds. During the time that Alice took to gently scold Albedo while Durin was washing the girl’s clothes from the colorful spit stains, Nigredo sat with her and watched, being watched in return.
She was a cute baby, there was no disputing that. Big floppy ears, even bigger red eyes, all topped off with a tuft of fluffy blonde hair, hands reaching out for everything in sight, a gleeful grin almost splitting her little face in two. Having inherited her mother’s love for conversations, she tried to babble Nigredo’s ear off right then and there.
Yet, Nigredo couldn’t bring himself to feel any kinship towards her. Of course, he was barely thirteen at the time, such a first impression was to be expected. Years began going by and seasons changed - unlike Nigredo’s thoughts on the matter and thus Klee continued being a stranger. The thought worried him, but should truth be told, if Klee moved out to live with her father and returned only for weekends, not much would change for him. Why? He had no idea.
At first, he thought it was jealousy, given that she was the iris in the eyes of just about everyone in the household, as even The Dog didn’t try to eat her at least once. At times, he’d see her napping on the couch next to Mother, who in between drinking coffee and typing away on her laptop would occasionally pet her on the head. Nigredo had never seen her being nearly as affectionate to either Durin or Albedo, and especially not him. When he was her age and would also fall asleep on the couch by her side, she’d just ask Durin to move him to his bed.
She also seemed happier than anyone in the household at all times, regardless of circumstances. Even bed bound with a sprained ankle she was bursting with joy more than Albedo after winning first place at yet another art competition, it was almost off-putting. After giving it much thought however, he decided it wasn’t jealousy or anything of sorts.
Quite plainly, he was afraid of the warmth she carried everywhere - least he’d get used to it, worse, get attached to it and inevitably mourn when that spark of joy would end up being put out by…Well, life in general, so he kept distance. Klee didn’t seem to mind that much either, given that sometimes she’d forget to include him on her little crayon drawings of what her family looks like.
Maybe it was for the better that she remained a stranger, after all.
Should one include The Dog as a family member, it was easily the one Nigredo felt least connected to, even if it was there before either of his brothers or he himself was born. Should one assume Mother’s enigmatic explanation of the thing’s origin was true, then it went as such : she picked it up on her way home from work.
Where she picked it up from or when, that was a mystery. It was already fully grown then and hadn’t aged a day since, hunting unsupervised toddlers and other small dogs with the same efficiency as from well over nineteen years ago. Worse, by some miracle, it kept spewing out litters of equally hellborn puppies which were the main reason as to why no one in their neighborhood left the house after dark without a weapon. Even worse, to this day no one could tell whether The Dog was their father or mother, or if it simply brought them into being through some other blasphemous act of creation, unavailable to lifeforms not feared and detested by the divine.
As such, Nigredo did everything in his power to avoid The Dog and its thirst for blood : feeding it raw meat, leaving through the window whenever he wanted to go out, or even letting it sit in his seat at the family table.
Alas, none of it was enough. Every morning, Nigredo would wake up and turn his eyes to the door, cracked open despite closing it before going to bed, and from there The Dog’s milky white eyes would stare back at him from the darkness.
All of that paled in comparison to the bottomless pit between Nigredo and Mother - the reason for its existence was an unsolvable enigma for as long as he could remember. Whenever either of them happened to be in the very same room, she never bothered to spare as much as a glance in his direction unless he directly addressed her ; only then did she seem to notice his presence, if not downright existence - only to immediately return to forgetting he’s there. One could tie it up to being a result of the brain damage she sustained five years prior due to a work related incident, leaving dents here and there in her frontal lobe ; as a matter of fact, that’s what most people did upon meeting her post-incident, attributing her coldness to the unfortunate circumstances. Of course, the average stranger didn’t know any better. As far as his memories went, even as a child she limited their interactions to a minimum by driving him to school, as more often than not she kept forgetting to pick him up, instead sending Durin to come fetch him, and when that happened to be out of question, she’d ask one of her friends to come pick him up as she was busy at work. Like always.
(Still, he remembered fondly each time her friends would pick him up. Ms. Andersdotter would spoil him rotten, telling him stories on the way home and stopping by bookstores to get him new books along with toys. She was the closest he had to a grandmother. Ms. Ivanovna meanwhile always snuck him some money before dropping him off at his house. Her car always smelled nice. Since he didn’t know sign language, he could never talk with Nicole, but the rides on her bike were a thrill he looked forward to experiencing time after time. He didn’t like walks home with Ms. Barbeloth that much. She’d jab his back with her cane, telling him to stop hunching, along with some morbid assumptions of what his future would look like. The only time Alice picked him up from school she got into a car chase and ended up crashing the car altogether.)
As if that wasn’t bad enough, that treatment was exclusive to him alone. Whenever possible, she brought Durin everywhere with him like a cane or an umbrella, even to conferences abroad or to lectures at the nearby university. Not once did she forget to voice her appreciation for his assistance, usually with a dry ‘thanks’ or ‘not bad’. Albedo, whenever he brought home another trophy, she’d praise from behind her laptop. Good job, keep it up, nice to hear that. Though the acknowledgement was barebones, it was still acknowledgement - which Nigredo desperately craved, as much as he never wanted to admit it.
He tried finding out why things were the way they were, on numerous occasions. Alice mentioned one time that his due date was in the middle of an important project at work, and that his mother never intended on getting pregnant - as he was a result of a series of hook-ups with a young man fresh out of highschool who worked at her institute as a janitor. To try and salvage the situation, he moved in with her, only to disappear after a year or so and Albedo showed up right after. Certainly, it would have explained his mother’s resentment, if there ever was any. She didn’t resent him. Not in the slightest. Her career thrived all the same after he was born, her work receiving many awards, her name showing up in science magazines all over. Not once was their home short on money. If she hated him, he would have known.
However, as it was, he might have never been born at all. She didn’t need him, simple as. Thus - no matter how much he tried fighting for her recognition - his existence was a trivial matter to her, easily forgotten. Sometimes, he found himself wondering : would she care if one day she found him dead in his room or anywhere else for that matter? Even just a little bit?
Only one, short answer came to his mind and it terrified him.
Thus, day after day, year after year - he watched his family from beyond the doorway. How they spoke to one another, the way they looked at one another, the way their presence seemed to make a difference in their lives. How happy they all seemed to be without him in the picture, as it seemed there was no place for him within it to begin with. Was it his fault, somehow? Did he do something wrong, somewhere? That and many similar thoughts plagued him, no matter where and with who he was : dreading the possibility that maybe he was simply born disposable.
More importantly…If his own family by blood and name didn’t need him, then who else would?