So I woke up today and said, I think I'll write some horrible, terrifying pornography about incest and child abuse, until everyone thinks Byakuran is a terrible person who deserves to be burned alive. OH WAIT
There's a whimpering, like an animal that's bleeding its guts out onto the forest floor, a steaming pile of regret and confused pain. Glassy, empty eyes, so honest and stupid and even though it's dying, it doesn't understand. His brother isn't dying though, beneath him, the bed moaning out softly in the night, and Ghost making soft, plaintive noises like springs supporting too much weight.
It's a little annoying, but because his brother is his brother, and they are in essence the same, he does his best to be patient.
"Ghost," he breathes out, lips impossibly dry from too much breath and his face wet, wet and hot and sticky even though the room is cold. His toes feel like ice cubes, legs dead weight in the tangled sheets. "If you aren't quiet, Father will hear and we'll get in trouble."
That quiets him down, though those eyes are still staring up at him, glossy and empty and animal. They almost look betrayed, wondering why this pain is here and why it's his brother's fault. He almost feels bad, so next he whispers, grunting as he pushed back in, feeling himself ready to give way too soon, "It's alright, after I'm done, you'll have a turn. We're the same, right? So it's important that we connect in body and mind."
He's not saying it aloud to convince himself. He's saying it to convince Ghost. He's saying it because he wants his brother to stop crying, wants him to enjoy this as much as he does. The tears, when Byakuran leans down to lick them from the identical pale face, they're disgusting and clammy. He doesn't care though, because in the next few seconds, Ghost grunts and goes silent with a hiss, and he is moaning and letting his salty, warm frustration pool out inside of the body he's buried in. "Ghost," he says again, happily, because at age 10, Byakuran is already convinced his brother and him were really meant to be in the same body.
Their father never finds out, although with the way he scowls and spits and positively hates Ghost, you'd think he did.
When they are 12, he makes a lewd, venomous comment at the table, staring out of the corner of his eye, about his sons being too effeminate. That night, Byakuran goes out and gets a tattoo right smack dab on his 'girly baby face'. Father is so pleased with it, that when he shoves Ghost into a night stand with a terrifying crash, Byakuran drags him out the next week and gets him an identical one, on the opposite cheek. He's not bullied for another 2 months, and Byakuran is so immensely pleased by his brother's newfound approval, then he climbs on top of him for almost 10 nights in a row, and does it again again again.
Ghost doesn't make the noises anymore, just blinks at him blankly, lets out occasional breaths. Byakuran's body sways, tired and lithe, muscles tense and body burning with exertion. Vaguely, he wonders why his brother complained about this. It stings, only a little, at the place where they're joined. The sensation is intimate, spine-tingling, of his brother's identical length pressed inside of his identical body, which he knows is every bit as tight and silky as Ghost's is. It stings, a little, but it doesn't hurt. He feels nothing inside. Tilting his head back, Byakuran breaths, and shudders, quietly letting orgasm roll through him, sticky hotness on his fingers and inside.
"Could you feel it, fratellone~?" he asks, his lungs empty. "For a moment, we were the same person."
He is never happy, he soon realizes. Everything is dull, everything is boring, everything is artificial. The smiles his parents wear to events, the makeup they put on Ghost to cover bruises, the way the maids wear their collars high to hide the hickies, in vain, from his mother. It's fake and colorless, and he can't understand why the world finds him and his brother's monotone skin and hair so contemptible, because they're just as gray and bland as him.
There's a phrase that rolls around in his mind occasionally, every few days, weeks, months. Something he must have read in a book, overhead on a television somewhere. 'Two halves of a whole'. 'My other half'. Something like a yin and a yang, if his father is working with the Asian flour distributors.
It's negligible, but the phrase manages to stick somehow. Bring forth the idea of people being pieces, chucks of some original being split off due to some sort of otherworldly presence determined to screw things up.
He begins to think maybe the reason he's so miserable is because he's just a shard, too. A half of a whole, wandering around incomplete and inefficient, like an axel with no cog to turn. He looks at his brother and thinks maybe that's what it is- that if only he could be Ghost, if Ghost could be him, then he'd be fine and he'd be fine and Father wouldn't be glaring at him for helping Ghost pick pieces of glass out of his hair.
They are 13, but Ghost is more like 12 still, and Byakuran doesn't understand why all the boys in his grade brag and obsess over sex. Doesn't understand why so many girls and bambola, what they call the girls who aren't really girls anymore, want him to stick it in them. They hang on him for his looks, for his charming laughs, for his money and popularity, and he thinks about how much Ghost used to whine about sex, and why on earth would they want to connect with him anyhow?
He isn't their half. They definitely aren't his.
But as he watches, he realizes they aren't as clever as he- that they have no clue who their half is. So they rush about connecting at the hips, at the mouths, knotting up in a swirl of arms and legs and trying to find out who fits the jigsaw of their body. Byakuran thinks it's sloppy, foolish. Like trying every piece of a puzzle with a single one until it fits, and then moving on to trying to join every other piece with that one, and so on and so on. It's embarrassing to watch, inefficient. His father would whack him on the back of the head hard enough to make his forehead kiss the table if he saw a method like that. Would yell and throw papers, shouting about the impending financial ruin of his company under such a stupid son. Byakuran does not do inefficient.
But soon Byakuran learns that unlike his brother, glassy eyed and still, he can make girls scream and writhe. Girls will beg. He remembers that bambola is another way to say 'doll', or even 'puppet', and so he starts to fuck girls for favors, whispering the word in their ears when he forgets their names and laughing at how haplessly they claw at him, try to fit to his piece.
His brother stops talking, one day, and he forgets when it happened but it is practically normal before anyone notices. It makes Father lose interest in him even more, and before Byakuran knows it, he is being led by the shoulder by a proud father into his study, being complimented and bonded with while the man forgets about the other son in the corner. He doesn't even bully him anymore, just ignores him, and it's actually an improvement until Byakuran finds himself at a loss for where to kiss his brother while he drives into him, with no bruises to guide his lips. He's at a loss, but it's only for a while- soon he finds that without anything to kiss better, that it's better to make up for lost attention. The more his father greets him with carefully shielded peripherals ignoring the second son; the more father offers him the chance to prove himself by coming along to a meeting, by reading over shipment protocols and learning the names of affectionate policemen, the more he kisses his brother until he bruises, until their bodies are numb and spent and the pleasure has faded into a gray fuzz, TV static. Pressing himself down on top of Ghost, his brother's hair is growing long, and he plays with it while he pulls his hips up, lets them sink down. "I won't let them cut it," he says softly to his colorless twin, smiling.
"It makes you look like a Greek hero~" and he is almost surprised by the way those glassy, wet eyes blink blandly, and calloused hands rest on his hips to help him ride.
He is 14 and he is a little bit happy sometimes, but not right now, especially since his father has taken him on a plane trip and, as always, forgotten Ghost at home. It's standard practice by now to ignore the other's existence, but it's the calculating, conniving look in the man's eyes that makes Byakuran irked, makes him want to pluck out those greasy orbs.
Maybe he's gotten too used to bland, lifeless stares. Maybe his possessive-protectiveness of his twin has made him feral.
His father wants to put Ghost in a hospital. It's just not right, he says, for a boy his age to never talk. To forget to dress, to forget to bathe, to forget to cut his hair. He looks like a fairy, he looks like a lunatic. He's an embarrassment to the Gesso, and you understand right, son? You're the good son, aren't you, the good one?
No, he thinks, recalling fucking his brother last night. I'm not the good one at all.
Byakuran gnaws his tongue within his smiling mouth, wondering how hard he'd have to press to rupture something. It feels filthy, that gaze. Amazing how just a glance can drag you into a conspiracy, into a ploy.
He is now conspiring against his brother, just by listening to these words.
"I'll talk to him, Father~" he says smoothly, and the man backs off just a bit, overhead lights of first class making his gelled back hair look extra greasy. He thinks of his brother in a hospital, white white white white white. Not even fake color. He thinks of how beautiful a rainbow Father's blood would make on the stewardess' dress.
The plane trip is to Japan, a country he has visited once before, although then it was with his brother and then it was with a Father he didn't dream of pushing out a window. The Japanese sky is blue, the Japanese buildings are neon and brown and cramped, and the Japanese people are colorful and exotic. They have skin like the sun drizzled mocha, eyes like cocoa. Eyes that stare at him, deep and clever and beautiful, and boast their pigment when they see the weird teenager, a dried glob of plaster on their rich silky tones. The only thing he wants to do is pluck out their eyeballs so they'd stop caring, and go home to his brother and tell him he'll never go anywhere with Father without him again. He realizes, somewhere in the back of his own lilac eyes that Ghost probably wouldn't care if he was in a hospital, because it wouldn't be much different from where he was now, ignored and treated like an incapable burden. But Ghost is Byakuran, and Byakuran is Ghost, and Byakuran has learned that you never tolerate an insult to yourself. The more he thinks about Ghost being sent away, the more he thinks about being a broken fragment of something, a pitiful axel without a wheel, of some working machine that was all fine and whole before they were born as two people.
He looks up at his guards, looks over at his father smiling and faking, and wonders if he wasn't made broken on purpose. He excuses himself to the bathroom, and while they're all whispering and flashing their teeth and adjusting their polyester, he climbs out a window and wanders into the sea of puzzle pieces.
Byakuran was 10 when he thought his brother was his other half, and he was 13 when he decided they were matching puzzle pieces, and now he is 14 and wondering why, if they match, why haven't they clicked into place and become a whole yet? The satisfying, quiet snap of a puzzle when it's joined properly- it only takes one try for it to happen. He thinks of soggy cardboard, of crinkled and frayed edges. He wonders if he hasn't been sabotaged, hysterically, plastering on a phony smile for the people walking by. There's something creeping on the back of his neck, a certain feeling. People liked to stare- and a lot of people did. But occasionally, there'd be someone walking past on the sidewalk, and they'd see white, and then their eyes would glaze over and they'd look away, as if trying not to stare at an amputee. He almost appreciates it at first. But then, after a few times of it happening, he starts to recognize the look. Glassy, animal, lifeless.
Byakuran stares at the neon signs, at the huge flat screen advertisements, at the Hello Kitty logos, and wonders why all he can see is a medical white, a bleached fluorescent bulb in a hospital cell. It'd match his brother, after all. A white medical gown, white hair, white skin. He'd be locked away and then Byakuran would never get another chance to make the jigsaw contours fit.
He hears the frustrated whining of someone getting knocked into by passerbies on a sidewalk, of an invisible boy being pummeled by the same people too busy trying to have color, the people staring with filmy chocolate eyes at Byakuran's hair and skin. There's the gurgle of a stomach, and the accompanied expression of nausea as a redhead stares distastefully at his hard won vending machine juice.
Thinking of red staining a hospital room, of Ghost with white wrists and red palms, slit open on a medical table, of himself crumpled in a splatter of red in some padded room, a bullet hole through the temple. Byakuran is counting the ways to kill Ghost, and by association himself, when he realizes that red hair is natural.
"That's unusual," he thinks, staring at the red in a sea of genetically defined black and gray and white.
Something inside of him clicks, and he wonders what part of the jigsaw that red piece would belong to. But he can't think
on it too much, because his guards have found him and he is being carted back to the airport.
Byakuran is 15, and Ghost is 15, although neither of them really want to, or are capable of acting their age. Ghost, through some clever wordplay and quite a few promises, is not in a hospital, although he has certainly changed- he trains everyday with the bodyguards, getting stronger, controllable, and emptier, all so that when Byakuran is deemed heir and inherits the flour company, he'll be a double. That's what he's convinced his father of, at least. He almost puked, wording it in a way that brought him down to the man's level- quiet, nonchalant whispers of effortlessly deciding to sign his brother's death warrant.
Meanwhile, Byakuran has to focus more on school- on things that Ghost is too 'simple' for, on things that genius entrepreneurs have to know. How to weigh and test for purity- how to label and mask to avoid prying eyes, dogs' noses. How to file the serial number off of a gun. How to deal with traitors. And, Byakuran thinks happily, when he traces the muscles of his brother's naked body at night, how to kill your predecessor.
Ghost doesn't whimper like squealing springs anymore, and they've long since stopped caring about the sounds of the mattress, because their father is halfway across the mansion, and it's no secret that Byakuran likes to fuck the maids. His brother is better than a maid, of course- but, staring into those glossy, animal eyes, mimicry of his own, he can't help but find them disappointing. Their bodies are slightly different now- Byakuran is wiry and fast, where Ghost is strong and slow.
Together, they're both a glob of defective, twisted, boring white, one of which blobs is going to be heading to Japan again tomorrow. Swirling his hips around skillfully, Byakuran closes his eyes and lets the pleasure flood him, lets his orgasm fill the gnawing, festering hole inside of his smile for a temporary moment. He thinks of red hair, a familiar face he'd managed to find on the internet, and beneath him, Ghost lets out a sigh and cums too, a single moan that is like a striking, glistening bubble rising up from the bottom of the bottomless,somber sea, blinking out of existence once it reaches the sky.