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It’s been odd, getting to know his brother again.
In most respects, he is the same person. And it isn’t as if Curtain hasn’t kept tabs on him. But seeing him through surveillance footage, through pictures and newspapers, through spyglasses… it’s not the same.
He isn’t the boy that left Nathaniel behind. He’s a man now, just as Nathaniel is.
It seems too obvious too even think, foolishly so, and yet there it is: he’s gotten older.
That’s Nicky’s face—not his own, because for all the ways they are identical there are a thousand tells, a thousand things Nathaniel never sees in the mirror, most tellingly the eyes—and there are lines, there is a beard, speckled with grey. Nathaniel has never seen his brother’s beard without grey.
He notices other things, little things, well-worn habits that are old, and yet still younger than the day that changed their lives. Things that are clearly nothing at all to Nicholas, that seem glaringly new to Nathaniel.
One in particular stands out: Nicholas seems to have troubles that don’t only stem from age, troubles Nathaniel doesn’t have. He moves more stiffly when it rains, in the cold, his limbs seem heavier, his joints stiff and strained—particularly one of his legs, which, when it’s cold or wet or miserable enough, he limps slightly to avoid putting weight on.
If not for the leg, Nathaniel may have put it all off to health. He took better care of himself than Nicholas did, after all, he always had, and so perhaps a decade of three of that had taken its toll.
Only there’s that damn leg, and the simple instinct that there’s something more.
He only asks once, keeping it casual. The rain outside pattered on the window, and the air was cold and misty, and even inside the big and rather old house wasn’t quite as warm and dry as it could be. Nicholas was limping, if only a little, wincing just slightly as he moved.
And Nicky just sends him a strained little smile, genuine but with a flash of something unreadable in his eyes, and says, quiet and dismissive and begging for Nathaniel to not examine closer, it’s nothing. Just an old injury.
Nathaniel had blinked, unsure of what to do with that, and it was only later that it had struck him what it must have meant.
An old injury. And who, after all, could have given it to him?
Morbid curiosity has him wondering if his men—never ordered to be careful beyond being non-lethal with Nicholas, and not particularly gentle by nature—had simply been rough, had broken something, or if it had been the shock watches. Or something else, even. Something worse.
But somehow, somehow, he just knows. He did this. He marked another difference between them, another flaw in the mirror image. He had permanently injured Nicky.
A few years ago, he may have thought it was only tit for tat—a physical wound for an emotional one, both still festering.
Now, he can only think—how many scars, how many old wounds?
(And yet still, he doesn’t understand the enormity: burns and scars on his brother, yes. But how many families? How many lives? For all the progress he’s made, Nathaniel remains myopic and short-sighted.)