Work Text:
Statement of:
Don Doe
Regarding:
My dead brother.
Date:
Nine years after the day my life stopped having a purpose.
In your own words, describe your experience with as many specific details as possible and what element you believe to be paranormal about it:
I know what you lot are. You’re a bunch of fucking perverts who just want to see the bare souls of society’s most pathetic cowards. I’m not judging. God knows I’m stiff competition in the pervert sector. When I first heard of you I was impressed, to tell the truth. It’s genius. Anyone with self-respect won’t see you as more than a joke, and anyone without it is so desperate for validation they’ll lick your boots clean. If you aren’t laundering money you fucking should be.
I’m wearing a black suit to be more anonymous, can you believe that? It has to be the first time I’ve worn something this dull since that nativity play I was in as a child. My mother dressed me up as an angel and I had to tell the shepherds that god had a child bride or whatever the fuck my lines were. I didn’t even get to say them because my little brother had been cast as a sheep and took such a disastrous tumble that, despite being on all fours, he managed to throw himself off the stage and break his arm.
He was like that, you know. Obviously you don’t know him, but everyone has that one person in their life who never wants to be the center of attention but can’t escape it because their sheer ineptitude draws everyone’s gaze like flies to a corpse. Rosi and I… we weren’t like most brothers. People like me, and fear me, and want to be near me. Usually that would cause some sort of resentment from the less successful sibling, but not with us. The more I pulled attention away from him the more he clung to me like a life raft.
I was two years older than him. He was so small the first time I met him, when my father positioned my arms and my mother set him into them. I had never been careful for a moment in my short life, but it changed that day. I had to protect him. He was so tiny and stupid and pathetic. If I didn’t keep him safe, who would?
It wasn’t like we always got along, of course. There were probably entire years where we didn’t exchange a kind word, but we were still always together. I used him as a sort of pack-mule in that way older brothers do, and he annoyed and adored me in equal measure.
What I’m trying to emphasize is that I knew my brother. I could tell when he was serious about something. I could feel when he was happy. I knew Rosi better than I knew myself.
The first time he died was a motor accident. He was only dead for twenty seconds in the back of an ambulance, but it still felt miraculous when he smiled at me from his hospital bed and scolded me for coming down from my first term in university to visit him. I hadn’t seen him the whole semester, hadn’t even bothered to call, but suddenly I wanted nothing more than to drop out and spend my days waiting outside his school, ready in case anyone even looked at him the wrong way, in case he needed me.
I didn’t, of course. I went back to university and he went back to stumbling his way through the world, oblivious to how many dangers loomed around each corner.
He was different over the holidays. I got up for a glass of water to find him standing in the hallway, blank-eyed and motionless. I assumed he was sleepwalking, but when I tried to speak to him he didn’t respond. Our mother got up, wrapped in her silk dressing gown, and led him back to bed. She reassured me that it was nothing that odd, that he’d just been having trouble staying settled at night. I was furious that she hadn’t told me, that I’d been left to discover for myself his odd lurking. I learned to guide him back to bed myself, and I found myself compulsively checking the hallway in the night when I was visiting home, and most of the time I’d find him standing blankly.
The second time he died was from an allergy we didn’t know he had – I never got a clear story out of anyone who had been there, but it was an incident at his summer job, something about cleaning chemicals and anaphylaxis. I was out of the country vacationing with my friends and didn’t even know he’d been hospitalized until I got home after his release. He looked pale and tired, but his grin was genuine when he held up his new epi-pen like some award.
I started finding him on the roof. I know that sounds concerning, but since I was used to his odd nocturnal habits it wasn’t. Not in an “oh my god my brother’s going to throw himself from the roof” sort of way, at least. Our house had a second story, a small attic space with sloping walls, and it had a window that provided easy access onto the roof. I’d taken my first girlfriend up there one moonless night and let her "wield dickscalibur," if you know what I mean. I’d never seen Rosi on the roof, but when I came home from the club during the summer 3AM haze and I saw his legs, clad in his ugly TARDIS pajama pants, dangling over the edge of the roof I wasn’t shocked. I was annoyed that he was wearing my designer Mean Girls themed slippers outside, though, so I went up to the attic to scold him.
The first thing that hit me was the taste of cigarettes. No one in our family smoked. We were too classy for that. But there was Rosi, lethargically smoking one after another, not shivering despite the gooseflesh over his scrawny bare chest.
He looked at me when I climbed through the window, just sort of rolled his head to the side and stared with empty eyes. It felt like I wasn’t looking at my brother. It was him, I knew it was him, but it was like all the parts of him I’d grown up with had been scooped out of his chest and all I could see were the missing chunks of his soul.
Our parents weren’t bothered, even when Rosi spent more and more time on the roof, coming inside at dawn smelling more like cigarettes than an alley behind a restaurant.
I got used to it. I didn’t come home the next summer, anyway, so I only had to deal with the oddness during the occasional visit. I was busy with an internship, and I just dropped by for Rosi’s graduation weekend. Sometimes I wonder how often he died and no one noticed. I should have asked him. I should have asked him a lot of things before it all came to a head.
I didn’t realize what was happening until I invited him to my thirtieth birthday party. We’d drifted apart, but I was throwing a huge event and figured if I was inviting Trebol I should at least ask Rosi if he wanted to come. There’s nothing wrong with Trebol, of course, but he’s too overtly slimy, like a car salesman. He was a good enough mentor when I was new to business ventures, but he ruins half his business relationships just because he makes everyone feel gross when they interact with him for more than ten seconds.
Anyway, Rosi was thrilled to come out to my mansion for the weekend and spend some time with me. It was apparently the first vacation he’d taken from the bookstore he worked at for all five years he’d worked there.
Vergo picked him up in one of my cars, and I met them on the front porch, rose bushes lining the driveway. The setting sun lit my brother’s hair, and he looked just as sweet and beautiful as he had for his entire life. The urge to protect him that had long withered and grown stale rekindled, and we had a lovely evening in the drawing room, chatting well into the night over a bottle of wine.
Despite the years we’d lost I knew him well enough to tell his fingers were itching for a cigarette and he was just being too polite to smoke indoors, so I invited him for a nighttime tour of the gardens. We walked through rows of orderly plants, soft lights along the pathway just bright enough to keep him from tripping over the cobblestones.
It was quiet aside from his occasional drag of smoke. I remember the moment I realized he wasn’t breathing. Well, he was when he lifted the cigarette to his lips, but aside from that he was entirely silent. I watched his chest, but it only expanded to draw in smoke. He wasn’t breathing. He looked at me, eyes shadowed by the night, and I could feel a sort of blankness in his expression. I just knew it wasn’t my brother staring back at me, despite the fact that he had been himself only fifteen minutes before. Did smoking strip him of his personality? I knew that wasn’t it. There was something about him that was wrong, had been wrong for a very long time.
“Can I climb?” he asked, voice monotone. He was gesturing at a tree that had strong branches jutting out at convenient heights.
“Rosi?” I asked, feeling cold. “Are you alright?” I couldn’t remember him climbing trees, but our childhood had been long enough ago that maybe I’d just forgotten.
“Can I climb?” he repeated, still without affectation or rhythm.
I must have said yes. I don’t think he would have done it without permission. All I remember is standing there, gaping with a creeping fear as he started to efficiently climb up the tree. He was twenty-seven, for fuck’s sake. Surely he had outgrown climbing trees.
He went up and up until the branches thinned. I called for him to come down, but he didn’t seem to be listening. He sat on a narrow branch, feet dangling over the edge, and I could feel the emptiness radiating off of him. I wanted to go get him, to bring him down to safety, but I’d had more wine than him and I didn’t trust myself to successfully get him without us both ending up injured.
It felt like an hour had passed when he finally shook his head, seeming to come to himself, and started climbing back down. I sighed in relief. Then his hands slipped and he fell back, arms pinwheeling as he tumbled downwards in slow motion. I heard the crack. It sounded like a branch breaking, or something wet snapping. I stumbled my way to the far side of the trunk, hands already fumbling for my phone. My brother was too accident-prone for me to hope he was uninjured.
Still, I hadn’t expected to see him upside down, neck twisted at an obscene angle, feet sprawled against the trunk. His head was turned to the side, and it was instantly clear that his neck was broken. I have never felt so cold in my life. I dropped to my knees with a cry. I couldn’t lose him. I couldn’t attend my baby brother’s funeral. I’d do anything for him to survive. At least, I thought so at the time.
He blinked and shifted away from the trunk, falling to a crumpled heap on the ground. An arm extended and pushed against the ground, lifting his shoulders. His legs jerked, trying to clumsily find footing. I knew I should keep him still, call an ambulance and not let him damage his neck any further, but it was like I couldn’t move. When had he gotten so tall? Sure, I was still kneeling in the flowerbed, shaking, but as he clambered to his feet he towered above me. His head was still wrenched to the side, neck odd and bent and lumpy. There was no way he couldn’t have severed his spinal cord. Aside from a repetitive blinking, his face was motionless as his hands fumbled around for his head until they each grasped it at the temples.
I screamed when I saw my brother lift his head and set it back on top of his neck. There was another cracking snap and his blinking eyes looked a little less like a doll’s emptily flicking eyelids and a little more like a person’s. I could hear his bones grinding against each other as he gave his head a shake. Then he nodded as if satisfied.
“You look cold, we should head back inside,” he said as if nothing had happened. I let him help me to my feet and numbly followed him back to the house.
I don’t remember much of the next day. I spent my time with Rosi, and most of it was normal. It all was. It was so fucking normal I felt like puking. How could he just act like it was all par for the course to break his neck and just put it back together? He was the same Rosi he’d ever been, except… well, my brother’s eyes had never been a deep scarlet.
I got a bit obsessive. If it had been anyone else, I would have cut them off and moved on, but there was something hurting my brother. Something was draining him from the inside out and I couldn’t let it go. I stalked him, I’ll admit it. As always, I had a lot to do to keep the money flowing and the cops looking the other way, but most of my work could be done remotely, keeping an eye on him from across the street.
I watched my brother die four times in the seven weeks I stalked him. Each time he dusted it off, immediately recovered. When people witnessed the accidents, they were quickly reassured that he hadn’t been hurt that badly after all. They were so glad that they didn’t have to phone in a dead body that they weren’t going to look too deeply into it.
He wasn’t in pain. That was what made me do it. If he had been suffering, I would have tried to get him out, to spare him from whatever was draining him of himself and knitting him back together. If he’d been hurting, I would have done everything I could to save him. But he wasn’t. He was just living as if nothing was wrong. It didn’t even hurt him to push his internal organs back through the slash in his belly when he got killed by a guy trying to mug him. It wasn’t my Rosi anymore. He’d lost too much.
If he wasn’t in pain, then he wasn’t my brother I’d sworn to protect. There was only one way to save him.
This isn’t court, so you’re not going to get a fucking confession about how I did it. The only thing that matters is that I killed my brother nine years ago – and it took two full clips in my handgun before he stopped trying to get back up. I think he realized that I meant it when I put the third clip in. I got him cremated, don’t ask how, and tried to move on.
My parents grieved their missing child, the police asked if I’d seen him within the last few months, and I played dumb knowing that I had done the right thing.
I started seeing him in mirrors first. He was always in the background, tucked into the corner where I only caught a glimpse before he vanished. It was Rosi, but it wasn’t at the same time. His face was… the only way I can describe it is by saying that he was peeled. It wasn’t like he was wearing a mask, because it wasn’t something over his face, but something underneath. His face had been removed, revealing a smooth white surface with an empty grin and blank eye sockets glowing red.
It wasn’t my brother, but aside from the gruesome ivory face it looked like him – same tall frame, same posture, same fluffy blond hair. The more time has passed the more real he’s gotten.
I see him in every mirror and every window and every puddle of water. I see him reflected in opaque walls and I see his shape in every passerby. Sometimes when I go into the city I’m surrounded by hundreds of him, a thousand grinning faces. He has the bullet wounds, too. Dozens of wounds on each one of his forms, constantly dripping blood. No one else can see him, of course. No one else smells the iron tang in the air.
But when I started to get gashes on my back three months ago others were able to see them, and they’re positioned where they’re impossible for me to reach, much less carve on my own. I’ve always slept on my stomach, and it’s hard for me to change that now, especially since my back stings with the wounds, but every time I leave my back exposed at night I wake up screaming, my brother crouched above me, peeling small strips of my skin off and slowly eating them, the scarring spelling out a sentence that gets clearer every time he deepens the wounds.
Brothers are brothers for life.
Thank you for assisting with our research! Please leave your contact information in case we need to follow up with you at a later date as part of our investigation or with anything we discover about your specific circumstances:
Trust me, I don’t want to ever hear more about this or talk to you perverts again. I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ll no doubt see as a psychotic break. I just wanted someone to know the truth.
Archivist’s Notes:
While the statement giver clearly left “Don Doe” as a play off of John Doe, he had an obvious resemblance to the billionaire Donquixote Doflamingo. The sheer quantity and variety of drugs he was seen to consume simply over the course of giving this statement point towards him having plenty of money, and it’s certainly in his character to make a “sword in the stone” reference about his genitalia. It is of course unsurprising that someone of his status would have crimes in his past, but admitting to murdering his brother that he seemed to love was a surprising confession. It’s certainly possible that what he saw could all be explained by inebriation and guilt, but there are certainly… stranger aspects to this story. Pictures of the wounds on his back were included, and they are indeed horrific. Donquixote Rosinante has been considered a missing person for over eight years and had an extensive but rather conflicting medical record. Donquixote Doflamingo is currently in the hospital for what is rumored to be an overdose, it would probably be worth getting in contact with someone who could keep an eye on him and see if he’s started to display an unusual ability to survive what should kill him. I would really hate to have to swing my focus towards removing a well-known billionaire from this chessboard, especially since he’s known for having connections to the Charlotte family, but I’m concerned about the implications of what he could become.