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There is something deeply visceral and fundamental about a sibling.
This goes for all sibling relationships, the good, the bad, and the deeply, uncomfortably complex—but, in Nom's opinion, especially when you are the eldest.
It felt like for the first four years of his life, he had been waiting for her to come along. Waiting for a small little blur of ginger and freckles to rock his world and fix it all in one go, perfect in every way she could be, even though she was annoying and stole his fries and was pathetically obsessed with becoming just like her big brother.
And, for his entire life, Nom had grown up hearing about soulmates and shadow. When he was perhaps five, and Katie was around a year old, his parents finally sat him down and told him what all of that meant.
Somewhere out there in the whole wide world, Nom had a soulmate. Okay—perhaps not the whole wide world, but his little corner of it. This person's emotions were going to color his vision—joy would give him yellow, anger would give him red.
It did explain why the world went greyscale when Katie was born. When he was eight, Nom told himself that he would try to color her world as best he could. It made it difficult to argue the way regular siblings, not soulmates who are siblings, would.
Whenever Katie wasn't really angry, just needed somebody to scream at, her orange frustration would tint towards loving pink, and Nom would just wait in silence while she got it all out and then barreled into him for a hug. Whenever he swatted her head for stealing a fry, she'd smile warmly at whatever color his fondness mixed for her.
And then Katie left for their mom's in the divorce when Nom was fifteen, and all of her light emotions became so much more frequent. Yellow was practically everywhere, sky blue for calm following in its footsteps. Nom couldn't stand it. He didn't think about how crimson Katie's world would be colored.
There was nothing to be done when their mother died, and Katie had to come home.
Living down the hall from her again was a special kind of hell. He loved it, because he loved his sister, because he missed her—because she hadn't said goodbye, and part of him always thought that might mean that she would come back.
Their careful dancing around each other lasted three weeks before Katie knocked on his bedroom door. She sheepishly wandered in without asking for permission, sunsets of orange, pink, and purple following in her steps, and perched herself right on his bed.
Nom shut the door as quietly as he could manage. He sighed, but managed to face her. She had finally broken, and told him everything—how scared she was, how she missed him, how worried she was that he would destroy himself without someone to remind him to eat and drink. She was right, and so he told her, too: how sad he was when her emotions were happier without him, how he forgot to take care of himself, how he dedicated himself to learning guitar just to have something he could do.
They talked all night, and Katie told him that she had learned ukulele. It felt more right than ever before to sit with her far after they should've been asleep, strumming instruments too loudly because their dad was a heavy sleeper. Blue and pink filled the air in swirls.
Nom was eighteen when Katie stormed into his room without knocking and just about flipped the world into a rainbow.
"NOMINAL GRAVES!" She shouted, pouncing onto his bed and damn near knocking him off of it. "I've discovered something!" The ginger menace beamed at him like she'd just encountered a brand new animal.
"What, pray tell, have you discovered, Katie Goober?" He smiled and earned himself a swat on the head.
"You're in love with Scott!" The girl announced confidently, grinning. "You know, Scott Springwell, new gardener kid in town—"
He must have flushed beet red, because she immediately burst out laughing and covered her mouth with both hands, immediately flopping down onto her stomach and kicking her feet like a giggling toddler. "So, you're crushing on that sweet guy—"
"DO I NEED TO BRING UP CHERRI AND APO!?"