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It starts, like most things, with bitterness.
Aaron would tell the first person to ever consider him sentimental exactly what he thought their observation skill were worth— fucking nothing, or as close to it as you can get to still have something left over, because to tolerate Aaron, you have to have some level of perception. He is easy to miss.
But then again, maybe he had a sentimental bone in his body. A single one. Lodged and misaligned till it was an ugly sort of sentimentality.
Because during everything and after, if you went through his stacks of textbooks, beat up novels bought with the pocket money he scrounged together, back when any escape from his head was needed to prevent someone from doing it in completely— if you got through it all, you would find that first letter Andrew had written him.
Folded over so it's yellow at the thin corners, fraying— there's salt stains from the childish tears, Aaron remembers but does not feel much over it— and he still has it.
What came from it? Fuck all. Tilda was a very good teacher of a lot of things, but one of the first, most successful lessons, was that just because she chose to keep him, does not mean much about his value. Aaron is still smaller than even the frailest, pinkest girls in his grade. He doesn't say much and he doesn't think much and he doesn't have much— and his twin brother is no exception.
Aaron owns nothing much of value, because he does not have much value, and a minus taken away from a minus only creates a positive in mathematics. Not in his fucked-up little life, complete with paper dolls of mother figures and poltergeists of brothers and he himself is the narrator without any clue as to where the fuck this would all end up in.
But what mattered, is that it had begun in rejection, and it would continue.
What does it matter, anyway? Aaron is good on his own. He's not like his brother— he is not hard to tolerate because he is too much. Too harsh, all jagged edge, a boy of black broken glass and a too-eager mind even when his mouth is clotted around a silence born from arrogance— he is simply, a little too little. People get sick of Andrew. It's the emptiness of Aaron that leads to them starving, and then going back to Andrew to get their fill of a backbone— but they do not come to him a second time.
Not a lot to remember, him. Aaron was always only known as far as it was necessary to understand Andrew.
But the letter— he kept it.
That first time reading it, he burst into tears, at yet another rejection. Maybe it had been worth it, to express such obvious pain at the concept of a brother— someone so like him, it was like they were one and the same from a certain angle, two same-colored lenses overlaid with only an inch of separation where you could tell that they were both hurt, but expressed it differently enough to make anyone believe that the quality of their pain was different—
It was worth it, Aaron repeated to himself, even now, nearly a whole fucking decade later. Because his mother had embraced him, and even let him get tears all over her shoulder, as she reassured him that he's better off without his shallow excuse of a brother, this is why I chose you, Aaron, I knew you were the half-decent one. They will never be worth a single thing to you, and you will never matter to them.
You have me, Aaron.
It had been nice. He was allowed to eat his dinner on the couch that day and Tilda let him take the next day off from school.
But everything that would ever take off and crash and burn with Andrew— it had started with bitterness that could not be overwritten. Not even by Tilda's saccharine, 50% discount kindness, it's a steal, get it now! until, of course, the next time she clipped him over the back of the head hard enough to send the world into small bits of color and cold warmth.
After that, the price was a little too high again. And Aaron could truly want a brother, if only for a shoulder to cry on, one that wouldn't turn on him.
There was always a next time.
Birthdays also always had a next time, and that little day, on that fateful little year, marked only by a small circle on the hallway calendar, was celebrated in the silence of Aaron's bedroom with only his own breath to keep him company. He laid awake. He counted sheep, and he counted the days that he had a brother without even knowing it. He counted until his heart beat into his mouth, and then he mouthed his brother's name until it congealed, then warmed, then fell apart in his mouth.
Because he had a brother who wasn't his to own, his to even love or get to know, despite all he wanted to do, and say, and learn about the boy.
Because Aaron was a marked person, who was a little too small to be noticed and a little too much like the average boy for anybody to second guess any of Tilda's handiwork as anything but a boy being a boy.
And it was no use crying over it, anyway. Because it was how it was, and he would always have himself, and his birthday would mark another year since his own blood and bone was surgically cut away from him, leaving behind every trace of his twin except for the boy himself.
It started in bitterness, and it was just what Aaron deserved, so it was no use crying over it now, all these years later.
•
“Do you like reading?” Aaron asked through the door.
Another question to fill the lines of silence between them. Aaron's voice was hoarse, and it was too much to imagine getting up and drinking something, or going to sleep, or doing anything besides sitting here, and asking question after question, and anticipating nothing but welcoming everything. Hope was an axe growing into a tree, having accepted defeat and the fact that an embrace of forgiveness cut deeper than cruelty.
This was a low point in Andrew's mood. They sometimes lasted for weeks, even a month at a time. Other times the sluggish crawl of his brother's temperament lasted for a few hours and was forgotten in the next fit of a sudden understanding that he could impact other people with his actions, and that was a joy for Andrew but hell on earth for Aaron, most of the time.
Now, it was a few days in, and Andrew hadn't emerged from his bedroom.
The only sign of life was the cleaning out of the plates of food Aaron left outside his door. When that eventually stopped, he would ask Nicky for help in breaking down the door. Or he could try his hand at picking the lock. The panic of thinking his brother had succumbed to starvation or some other variant of giving up would decide for him.
Now, all he wanted was to hear Andrew's voice.
A month ago, their mother had died. Weeks ago, Andrew was finally released from the hospital. A few days ago, Aaron had Nicky do up his tie and comb his hair for the funeral.
He had let his cousin fuss over him. Smiled in all the right places, nodded when asked something, did his best to not let any sliver of the swirl of dread in his stomach show.
Because among all of it, the seeping pond of grief making him slow, and the anger, or the cloud of confusion making it difficult to breathe, and all else— there was relief, at his mother finally being unable to do anything to him or his brother anymore. But there was the sudden, cold settling of a loneliness he thought was impossible to feel and not die of. And all for the one person that despite it all, had never left his side, and had never let him know anything besides the feeling of being her child.
And Andrew had gone cold, and limp, and completely detached ever since the wreck of the hollow justice. Pyrrhic victory.
Aaron thunked his head against the door at the receiving silence. He had not expected anything different. There would not be anything different. Maybe someday, but— it was all too raw now. Even as he closed his eyes, he imagined the flashing of the headlights before everything went dark, and the bile rose in his throat as he thought of that being the last thing his mother saw.
The possibility, the slip of it, that it could have been the last thing his brother saw.
Dully, through the film of tears, Aaron heard a vague shuffling beyond the door.
Sign of life. Their mother was a cold, limp form in the ground, and soon the winter's long, slender claw would lull her flesh away forever, and they would remain as the only thing of life she left behind.
Aaron's breath shuddered out of him in one large exhale, and he counted the lines in the ceiling as he waited for anything at all to happen. For the ground to collapse beneath him, for his heart to stop, for all of this to hurt him physically the way it had hurt his mother. His brother. Just beyond the wall, but he was also sharing his mother's cold bed.
Distantly, but firmly as a strike of lightning, Aaron felt a brush of touch at his fingers, resting by the slip of space between the floor and the door.
His next breath cracked the silence lingering in the hallway, and as he cried into his knees until he could hear his heart thundering in his ears— the light touch at the tips of his fingers beneath the doorway never left.
There was nothing they could do. Time did not fix anything, it only gave the wound time to fester.
It was a cold day and a warm hallway, where grief came to take off its heavy cloaks to reveal defeat, ready with its axe, prepared for more pain to come from the violence of continuing on.
•
Andrew was medicated to the fucking high heavens, and Aaron had even less idea than usual on how to approach him, and it was fucking over him in every way possible.
He was a snarling cat, usually, and now the happy pills— Aaron sneered around the words when he said them, and relished in the equal amounts of guilt and joy that churned in his stomach at Nicky's averted eyes— had tamed him into a snarly cat that would smile as it bit you.
It was a little too much like watching a goddamn amputee animal give up biting itself when the collar got tight, and resort to lashing out on any part of another's warm flesh. Aaron had learned— God, if only high school geometry came to him this easily— that Andrew had a real bad habit of viewing everybody the same way he viewed himself. And he cared little about himself, it seemed, so fuck did it matter what he did to other people, as well.
Especially on their birthday week.
Especially when Nicky was tripping over himself to make it at least somewhat bearable, even when Andrew could make his own reflection in the mirror hysterical in record time and Aaron was too fucking stuck in the riddle that was this family, and the pain that was growing up, knowing, that he could have been normal if not for this family, and realizing that he had it good, and wanting something better so badly, that he was ready to do anything to escape, anything at all—
And it was how it was meant to be, Aaron repeats in his head glumly in the face of yet another slammed door, or broken dish, or silent glaring match with an over-eager, fraying-at-the-edges Nicky, or his mother's gravestone.
Same day he was born. The same day the one responsible for this mess was born.
Same day, same day, another day. It was all the same. Every last thing felt like the world was tilting on its axis, and then would end, but then the next morning Aaron would get up again, eat whatever Nicky threw together before going off to work, and find a way to get through the day, and then it would all repeat.
Only Andrew changed, and even that was developing a pattern.
A pattern that could not even be broken now, Nicky placing a birthday cake and a shred of hope on the cleaned-up dinner table.
Aaron made a big song and dance about how ungrateful Andrew was, about everything that Nicky did for them, about everything Aaron tried to do for him, and would do for him if allowed— but he knew deep down, that everything Andrew had been turned into was far beyond the reach of something they could fix.
He wasn't stupid, despite Tilda's words, and he wasn't blind. Aaron had read up on every sort of legally prescribable medication the same way he had read up on court trials when they were hit in the face by one. He knew all there was to know about every disorder in the goddamn DSM-5, about genetic factors, about every title and slur that had ever been thrown at Andrew— and he knew that if the pills couldn't fix his brother, if any of the support they threw at him couldn't fix him, then maybe he really was destined to be this way.
Aaron had accepted long ago that this is what they were. And this is what he always will be. And that there was no use doing anything about it.
It was not defeat, it was a simple recognition of circumstance. He was fucking logical even in all of his rage, or pain, or hope. Or all three on the spin-rinse-repeat cycle.
And he couldn't understand why Andrew couldn't accept it.
Why he still fought against the restraint of the happy pills. Why he still fought back against every accusation lauded at him in school by going out of his way to prove it so something worse came up. Why he fought by pushing Nicky and Aaron to their fucking limits until they snapped, and then floundered in the face of Andrew's overdramatic hurt, and then simmer in betrayal when he laughed in their face about it meaning fuck-all to him after all—
And then, the final stroke of Andrew's sick genius was making Aaron stay up late, turning every last argument and word and action over in his head, trying to figure out what was true and what was fiction. Medicated or sober. Andrew or the cheshire cat the court had forced him to become to protect the poor, victimized surroundings.
If only they knew, Aaron thought in the skim milk, cheap, cruel humor, broken glass, another thing to deal with. If only they knew that now they had made Andrew into a proper threat.
Nicky was carving out three careful slices of the chocolate mousse cake he had painstakingly made for them, scrounged together from the last threads of his paycheck. Andrew looked bored, chin resting on his palm. It was only his white-knuckled grip around the leftover dinner butter knife that betrayed he felt anything at all.
Aaron avoided looking in his eyes. The pupils were always blown after he took a fresh dose.
The silence was thicker than the chocolate ganache. Andrew made a show of sticking the butter knife in the slice Nicky presented him. Watched the knife slowly tilt and fall, clatter to the table.
Nicky flinched. Aaron could not fuss up enough fucking surprise at the hysterics.
It really was a good cake. There was now frosting streaked on the table, and hurt was laid on thick over Nicky's face when Andrew got up and left without another word.
The chocolate was bitter as Aaron forced down the rest.
Dishes were washed in silence, Nicky's shoulders tense even when Aaron thanked him, brushed shoulders with him, cleaned the mess up. It felt almost like every remnant of the previous year of normality had gotten chopped up, scattered over the calm they tried so hard to hold onto, before being served in a massive fuck you pie to every person within five mile radius of the Minyard family.
Only Andrew didn't care.
Only Aaron wondered how much of that lack of care was the drugs, and how much of it was the genetics, and how much of it was a lie.
Little seventeen. Aaron thumbed over the empty pill bottle Andrew had left in the sink the next morning. Wondered how bitter the high was. Wondered why he even cared. Wondered why he even bothered asking anymore.
•
“What do you want for your birthday?”
The defeat feels like taking off a sweater five minutes after putting it on because you soon realize the warmth is not the type you need. He cannot figure out if he should be relieved to succumb to it, or feel newfound dread at having actually asked.
Andrew's single raised eyebrow before he blows smoke in Aaron's face is enough to have the beginnings of a headache forming somewhere behind his eyes.
“Your birthday?”
“Shut up,” Aaron leans against the wall across from him. The hallway is blessedly empty as they wait for Kevin and Josten to finish showering after evening practice. The exhaustion has gone down to his bones, but it will make falling asleep without having to overthink possible. Small mercies, or whatever.
Andrew manages to look smug even as his face remains blank. “Why should I shut up? You're the one who asked.”
“Shut up,” the headache is coming on full force now. “Of course I'm asking about your fucking birthday, not mine or ours. That's the point of gifts, you know.”
“I thought the point of gifts was them being a surprise.”
“And I thought asking a question would give me an answer, not more smartassery.”
Andrew shrugs, stabbing his cigarette out on the bottom of his boots. He's clearly done with the conversation, even if did not have his attention to begin with. Aaron thinks some kind of momentary insanity overtook him when he decided to ask. “Use your own head. I can't hold your hand through everything.”
“Maybe I'll get you a guide book on manners, how about that?” Aaron mutters, but Andrew is already retreating in the direction of the stadium doors. Aaron can hear the door to the locker room slam and lock, and the familiar voices of Kevin and Josten soon following up.
Nothing will ever be worth it when it comes to Andrew, he decided on his way to the Maserati. Maybe the challenge is why he keeps trying, or some misplaced element of masochism. But there will never be an award, even a simple recognition. A pat on the back for trying is a pipedream.
But giving up feels like too much, this far in.
The earlier exhaustion had been a cruel trick, as Aaron still stays up till he's dizzy, mind turning in circles until it begins slowing. The worst thing is having a feeling that things are leaving your already flimsy grasp of control, but being entirely powerless to stop the rolling freight train.
it would be easier if everything could crash and burn, instead of slowly simmering until the last sparks go out.
•
Jealousy is no pretty thing, but Aaron does not consider aesthetic value before he feels something. He's not a sociopath.
And anyway, it would be a vast underestimation to describe how he feels about Neil-fuck-knows-if-thats-really-his-name-Josten as mere jealousy.
He thinks, during classes he understands too well to pay attention in, idly scratching at the same spot in his notebook with a pencil until it rubs thin, that his problem with Josten would be far too pretty and neat to even be considered, if it was not in relation to Andrew.
On his own, the other boy could be infuriatingly smug, too clever for his own good, noisy enough to put Nicky to shame, an absolute headache and a beast on the court and someone who rearranged the way the Foxes breathed and functioned before he could even be snuffed as a mole or something worse— that worse being so much worse than they could have imagined, but Aaron guesses it all worked out in the end, so yippe ki-yay, its all water under the bridge. Something like that. Everybody moved on far too fast from the fucking messes the guy got them all into, but that was his bitterness to hold onto. His.
It didn't revolve around Andrew, that portion of Aaron's issues with Josten.
The other part was far uglier. It was a sickening, ugly thing burrowed in the boldest parts of Aaron's psyche. He is not above feeling something that is unjustified, and that is the seething jealousy that curled around his every fiber, at seeing how well Josten and Andrew slot together. Innate as breathing.
On a good day, Aaron can get a nod from Andrew in response to small talk. On a really good day, Andrew will make them both coffee in the morning, instead of making a point of boiling enough water for one cup, blocking Aaron's attempts at getting to the leftover coffee, or simply dunking half the goddamn sugar jar in his drink, just to spite Aaron.
On an average day, Aaron is a blank space in his brother's peripheral view whilst Neil Josten remains as the center of the goddamn universe, it seems.
His anatomy notebook will be fucking wrecked by the time this semester is over, Aaron considers, as he watches his pencil stab through at least ten pages in one clean swoop as his inner turmoil boils over in one jagged drag of his wrist. His fingers twitch. He can feel the cold of the lecture hall in his fucking teeth. Or maybe that's just a side effect of thinking about Neil Josten for longer than five minutes at a time.
It's a sucker punch to the jaw, that his brother could exist around him long enough for Aaron to forget that he once only knew his face by looking in the mirror, and yet still only exist as a vague concept.
He has a brother. He knows his name, time of birth, the amount of clothing he owns in the exact colors he has them in, his favorite things and his least favorite things and what time he likes to get up at when there's no schedule, and how he like winter but hates the transition period between wet autumn and cold frost. And everything else, and so little else, if he were to put it all down in numerical order.
Aaron knows, and knows, and hoards the information like a starved dog in the rain looking for leftovers. Sometimes, he even understands.
But he had to fight like hell for every bit of that. It had taken months to get into contact with Andrew after the initial letter that kickstarted it all. Longer, even, to make enough room in his soupy brain for the understanding that Aaron loved his brother before he even knew him.
And even longer— an endless stretch of a wasteland inhabited only by the pain of it— to accept that he loved his brother even as he did not like him.
Loved him even when he wasn't sure that he was loved back.
And Josten had come in and gotten it all down in the time it took for Aaron to get Andrew to acknowledge his existence, and all of it still ended in being written off as a mere person. A small doll in Andrew's carnival of discarding people like they meant nothing.
As a brother, there were the deals, the protection, the understanding of there being things that only they knew, and only they could understand— but that is exactly where it ended.
Aaron was a bit of a pet project to Andrew, when he took a step back to look at it from how it truly was. It was like seeing the color blue all your life, as the only thing you knew how to understand, and then taking a step back and realizing your nose was pressed to the blue part of the canvas all along, and all the blame for the pain was laid heavy on the shoulders of you being a fool.
He was stupid for being jealous and even stupider for not being able to get over it even as he understood the cause. Maybe his mother had been right about him after all. Aaron was stupid, and Andrew was no better but at least he did not express it, so it could not be proven true in the court of public opinion. She was probably foaming at the mouth in glee in her grave.
Great doctor he will make. Fantastic, even. Understanding the cause, connecting all the symptoms, and still being unable to cure it. Aaron was watching his own deadened heart gasp for air on the operational table and he was too much of a wussy to take the scalpel and pull at the sickness until he could hold fresh air in his mouth— and live to understand. Not simply know what he has to accept, and still fight against it.
It's not about what he deserves. It is about what he is meant to have and live with.
Too bad Josten can't seem to understand the same, and insists on rubbing salt in the wound every day. Even going as far as overwriting the small, scared thing that is the silence Aaron and Andrew spend their birthday in.
They mentioned something about a weekend birthday trip to Columbia, just the two of them, in the car on their way to morning practice. It was barely a thing that needed to be said, just a thrown out piece of information for anybody who needed it. Aaron fucking needed it.
For the past years, every birthday had been spent in a tense, almost hysterical silence. Like a string that needed to be cut but the scissors were missing and it was too much risk to let each other out of sight. But it was theirs. One thing that had stayed the same through it all. Medicated, unmedicated, sick or close to well. Alive for another year.
Only the two of them.
It was now gone. Another thing Aaron once had but did not have the right to own anymore, because his worth as anything at all to his brother had crashed through the floor and into the core of the earth like a fucking roaring 20s stock market.
And just because this is how it is meant to be does not mean that Aaron can deaden the hurt it brings him.
He's not much. He is easy to overlook. He is a way people get introduced to his better half. He is a small thing even among the shortest girls or the softest, most leather-faced boys. He will never have Andrew's presence, or audacity, or shamelessness or fucking mental illness— but he is still flesh and blood. Human. Birthdays and old friends— two things that never leave you, not in every form.
Sphynx twins. If only one of them still didn't hold onto the bleeding seams of where they were torn apart.
Aaron cannot purge the fact that Andrew is his brother. He cannot look himself in the eye, every morning, the mirror a perfect image of not only Aaron, but also the boy cut off from him in increasingly drastic ways, and find a way to overwrite that part of reality. And—
Big fucking deal. The sentiment overtakes him when he gets sick of wanting something different. What does it matter? It is not like Aaron has much else of worth to lose, besides what has always made him into what he is. It is another thing taken, another score for the world, or their cursed bloodline, or fuck else that decided that this is how it will be.
Andrew is the backbone he does not have, and he is the cold passion Aaron will never possess. Because Aaron has a big mouth and a short temper and too many fucking hang-ups involving somebody who clearly wants not much to do with him— and it still hurts, and he cannot cure it despite dedicating his entire future to what he can only assume is worthwhile.
Helping others. What a joke. It's like the universe is robbing him clean and telling him that it's only checking his pockets for holes. He can't even help himself.
The lecture hall is slowly thinning, and the professor is sending odd glances Aaron's way, but he can't fucking get up because he can't get out of his own fucking head.
Tomorrow they both turn twenty one. Two decades, counting, since everything began taking its steep turn down. Now, everything is on its way up for everybody besides Aaron. All because he doesn't want to abandon the small corner in the downward spiral that Andrew seemed to always be on, in hopes that the past matters enough to Andrew so he still keeps it around, because Aaron will never matter to him outside of that. He will never be chosen by his brother on his own, despite the deals and the therapy sessions and the good days— and he does not know how to fix it, and he really should go home and do his preparatory studying inside of trying to keep from fucking crying in the middle of the lecture hall.
Everything Aaron has with Andrew began in bitterness and hate, and it had never progressed any further. Diluted. Never turned into something new.
Everything Andrew seems to have with Josten began in that same hate, but it has grown into something Aaron can never have. Not in any way.
The next morning, Andrew and Neil have already left, too early to be heard. Aaron will forget his own issues in the easily solvable homework assignments, and he will leave Andrew's birthday gift— the one he had eventually figured out on his own, thank you very much, because he's had enough of listening to Andrews tsks and heavy frowns each time he loses another one of his cheap lighters— on the coffee table in the other dorm, and he will forget about what once was to focus on making a sandcastle of what could be, if not with his brother then with his future, because Aaron can have nothing and be at peace, because that is what he deserves. He deserves a quiet room and an empty hallway and he will anticipate nothing else. He—
It is not about what he wants.
It—
There is a still-warm cup of coffee standing on the kitchen countertop when Aaron emerges from his bedroom. It's topped with just the right amount of milk, and there is a small, neatly wrapped box next to it.
Aaron presses his palms into his eyes so hard that stars swirl, and he chokes and chokes on the urge to cry, and beneath it all— the urge to laugh.
Because, after all—
He was not liked. He was not tolerated in any amount larger than the minimum. And— maybe he could never understand. Aaron could never tolerate Andrew in any large amounts either. Still, he had to look for the small scraps of recognition like the mutt he felt like sometimes.
But he was— loved, as odd as it was, even in some closeness to the degree he thought he also loved. It would never be spoken, but it could be something to remember, when things fell apart, or went out, or changed form, or simply— shattered.
Because he had a brother, and he would never know all there was to know, or understand all he wanted to grasp. But he had him, even in the small moments Andrew would give himself over to be had.
Aaron had himself. And he had memory, And he had the beginning, the pulse point of the present, and the vague shape of the future. All in the brain that had formed at the same time as Andrew's. All in that he shared and had only to himself.
It was a cold day and a quiet kitchen, where belonging took off its smile to reveal grief underneath, and that grief would come back in a hundred different coats, and someday— maybe just for a single day in their cursed bloodline— they would belong to each other in the exact way they were meant to be.